De Wederopbouw van het Westen, WITROODZWART

A cheery meandering stream

Last season de Koe gave a party in the Kaaistudios: the Grand Finale of their Wederopbouw van het Westen. Together, the three parts – Wit, Rood and Zwart – are good for 4.5 hours of pure theatrical pleasure: text and performance, music and stage design… it all swings like crazy. A superior synthesis of all the beauty that ‘alternative theatre’ has produced over the last thirty years.

In Wit (white) the actors look back at the world of their childhood. In Rood (red) the stormy but fleeting life of Elizabeth Taylor is the model for the Western attitude to life. Zwart (black) focuses on the hopeful cultural rebirth of the Renaissance. In the finale the actors once again interweave the three parts to create a cheery meandering stream full of personal memories, historical anecdotes and unexpected philosophical insights.

• On its establishment in 1989, de Koe created performances that reveal a ‘cheerful pessimism and razor-sharp analysis of the human soul’. The company peels off man’s outer layers and puts him on show, though very compassionately and with naive, disarming self-mockery and poetry.

‘de Koe at its best: absurd, comic, tragic, philosophical, socially critical and wonderfully grotesque.’ - Knack