Revolutionary Road

In Revolutionary Road,  we get to know April and Frank Wheeler, as well as a number of friends and colleagues. April and Frank make a wonderful couple. Life smiles at them: house, garden, children, work... and love, so much love. They have it all. They dare to dream big and are determined to live life to the fullest. To avoid getting stuck in a narrow and bourgeois existence in a society where conformity rules, they conceive the radical plan to leave everything behind and move to Paris and start a new life. But they are overtaken by reality and their hopes are destroyed. Out of frustration at their shattered dream, they aim their arrows at each other, turning their love into a nightmare.

Having explored Ingmar Bergman with Infidèles (2018), STAN and De Roovers dig deeper into the realm of human failure with Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road . The book embodies the quest for freedom and selfless love and the immeasurable strength and courage it takes to radically change a life. Besides the relational aspect, Revolutionary Road also has a distinct social and political dimension that also makes it a relentless critique of the stifling and mind-numbing nature of societal expectations and shows how difficult it is to escape them.

Two young actors, Ivana Noa (master student of the Antwerp Conservatory of Music) and Flor Van Severen (Wolf Wolf, Camping Sunset) take on the roles of April and Frank Wheeler, while Jolente De Keersmaeker and Robby Cleiren play all the other roles. Two generations of actors with a great love of text set out to create a house close in which they will battle each other with Richard Yates' razor-sharp dialogues. Somewhere between Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and a string quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich.

• STAN is a regular appearance in the Kaai programme and is known for their open way of working - everyone decides on everything from choice of text, set and lighting to costumes and posters.

• de Roovers is an Antwerp theatre collective of four actors/makers. They never work with a director and each creative process is a collaborative search for the story that needs to be told at that moment. The actors delve into text theatre, adapting classical repertoire by Shakespeare, Chekhov and Aeschylus and others or engage with more contemporary writers such as Paul Auster and Judith Herzberg. But equally, they make theatre for children or venture into musical theatre.