Of Wittgenstein

Donkey’s ears

At the end of WWI, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein thought that the problems were solved for good. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, completed while a prisoner of war, he thought he could banish the ambiguity from language that leads to misunderstandings in the world: ‘one should remain silent on things about which one cannot speak’.

In his ‘linguistic theatre’, the director and actor Lucas Vandervost was one day bound to end up dealing with this essential philosophical work on the relationship between world and language. He counter’s Wittgenstein’s quest for clarity with his contemporaries, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and Paul van Ostaijen.

With donkey’s ears on his head, Vandervost turns Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to his own ends. Not as a lesson in philosophy, but in a unique monologue in which the actor reveals and analyses Wittgenstein.

• From 1987 until the present, Lucas Vandervost has headed the Antwerp company De Tijd. He is reviving Of Wittgenstein, which he created in the 2009-2010 season, specially for the Kaaitheater.