The past that haunts a family: "The things that pass" by Ivo van Hove

© Jan Versweyveld

A wide corridor-like void in the middle of the playing area that goes deep backwards. The void gets twice as deep with the reflection in the mirror covering the very back. It is as if the depth of the space brings with it the depth of time. Traces of the past in the depths of the space seem to be visible… Chairs are lined up on both sides of this void. The members of the family whose story is told in the play sit on these chairs from time to time. Even if all the family members are seated, there are chairs which remain empty. Maybe those empty chairs mark the family members before and after the story that we haven't seen, expanding the time of the story… Behind the chairs are large transparent surfaces with grotesque and primitive face figures drawn on them with mud. Maybe they are the ghosts of the past… The servant of the family brings chairs from both sides to the front and middle line of the void. The couple, in their 90s, in the center of the story sit on those chairs… Years ago, the woman and her lover killed her husband one night at her insistence. The murder, hidden by their love, mortgaged the past, the present and the future of the couple's children, children of their children, family friends such as family doctors, that is, everyone close to the family, and did not leave peace in the family for actually everyone knows about the murder but cannot talk about it ... Since they could not come to terms with the past, with the death of their father/ grandfather, anger, exhaustion and lovelessness accumulated in the children, so that there is no power to survive and the joy of life left in none… Even the joy of the marriage news coming from the younger generation of the family, even the joy of the ecstatic sexual intercourse of the newly married couple does not make anyone happy even for a single moment. Yet everyone expects love from everyone; mothers want to be kissed by their sons, uncle by nephew, but the kisses given to the lips over and over do not contain affection, emotion, or love… A dark, dense melancholy descends on the twilight of the place and on everyone. They seem to be struggling in the atmosphere of an endless and never-ending funeral… Their lives are interwoven with things, feelings and situations that never go away and obviously will never go away. Therefore, even if the generations pass, the members of the family will not be able to be purified. The unaccounted past, as an intangible and immaterial entity, will suck them in, like a vortex, and swallow them; they will disappear in it ... 

© Jan Versweyveld

Ivo van Hove, one of the masters of contemporary theater, adapted the novel Van oude menschen, de dingen die voorbijgaan (About old people and things that pass) by Louis Couperus, one of the most important literary figures of the Netherlands, with the ITA (International Theater Amsterdam) of which he is the artistic director since 2001. The things that pass met with the theatergoers on their screens on April 25, 2021 within the scope of ITALive, the live broadcast program from the stage that ITA has been programming since the beginning of 20-21 season. This is van Hove's second adaptation of Couperus' novels. We had the chance to watch his first adaptation De stille kracht (The Hidden Force) within the scope of ITALive in November 2020. 

Van Hove transforms the monsoon rain that completely covers the stage in The Hidden Force into a rain of black ash in The things that pass. In the second half of the play, the stage suddenly turns completely black; the tension and pressure that have been increasingly tightened the emotional spheres of the characters of the story until then, suddenly cover all and everything in material. In the last scene, this time, a dense fog that cuts off the connection with place and time and loses orientation covers the ground and rises gradually until it swallows the youngest member of the family - who got married at the beginning of the story and tried to look for a new beginning with hope. 

© Jan Versweyveld

The music, which is almost a non-verbal requiem, and which lasts almost uninterruptedly in the 130-minute play and contributes greatly to the creation of the melancholic atmosphere, is performed live by the composer Harry de Wit on the stage with a wide variety of instruments. Only one of Nina Simone's cult songs Wild is the Wind comes into this atmospheric sound landscape of de Wit. Van Hove puts this unique song at the center of his mise-en-scène, which tells about the damned lovers who want to “cling each other tightly like a leaf clings to a tree” but are blown from place to place like the creatures of the wild wind. Van Hove shows us how those lovers as if they were in the calm area in the center of the hurricane were unaware of the futile struggles of their relatives and passed through this world after spending a lifetime, while the pressure of the wild wind they created swirls everyone around them causing destruction. 

All the creative crew and actors with whom van Hove has been working for years in ITA, produce qualified works in this piece. The scenography of Jan Versweyveld, the partner of van Hove, is like an installation in which the actors move. Koen Augustijnen's movement design handles human bodies as fragmented or dense sculptural groups within that installation. Costume designer An D'Huys transforms the whole performance into a funeral rituel by putting all the members of the family in black except for the reckless daugther living in the Cote d'Azur, in a colorful chiffon dress.

© Jan Versweyveld

The things that pass was first staged in 2016 in the Machine Hall of the Zweckel Power Plant in Gladbeck as part of Ruhrtriennale. At that venue, I watched Krzysztof Warlikowski's Francuzi (The French) in 2015. Watching The things that pass in Zweckel, which is one of the finest examples of the industrial heritage of the early 20th century, which is preserved almost exactly as it is, where you can see and feel all the traces of time and memory layer by layer, would probably have been a chilling experience. The overlap of the layers of the family's past in the story with the memory of the existing place of Zweckel must have added an extra dimension to the representation there, both semantically and visually.

Although I could not have the opportunity to experience the uniqueness of watching this impressive piece live, staged like an installation regarding to its soundscape, choreography and scenography, which toured from Avignon Festival to St. Petersburg in Europe between 2016-2018, I enjoyed a lot watching it while sitting in my comfortable seat at home thanks to ITALive. 

Ivo van Hove and his company ITA’s next project, a large-scale adaptation of several ancient Greek plays, Age of Rage will be premiered at the Holland Festival in June.

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[The Turkish version of this article is published on Tiyatro Tiyatro Dergisi]