Needcompany in "La Maison des Cerfs"

After “La Chambre d’Isabella” and “Le Bazar du Homard”, it's into the forest – that twilight zone of primordial fears and altered states - with the Needcompany, in a new show “La Maison des cerfs”. In this final piece of the Sad Face/Happy Face trilogy, director Jan Lauwers explores the former side of the coin in a work which takes as its point of departure the death of the brother of a company member: the journalist Kerem Lawton, in Kosovo. Ethical questions of responsibility and involvement in situations of war prompt the story of a mother’s fight to save her family from civil turmoil by retreating to the country. In the style of the Needcompany, however, these preoccupations are mostly deflated by ironic distance, beginning with the sexual play of the show’s opening dressing room scene, which at the same time seeks to approach these very serious issues through the fictional journal of a war photographer.

As in "La Chambre d'Isabella", the set is strewn with an almost inconceivable quantity of objects, here mostly fake deer and their various parts (antlers, countless sets of them). In their pale rubber state, they appear more like formaldehyde specimens than creatures or even hunting trophies, though they also serve in this way as a metaphor for the corpses of the tale, especially in their piling up at show’s end in a kind of anticipated funeral pyre. A certain amount of cliché (a murderous, feuding family) and banality (the mediatized sufferings of war victims), not to mention histrionics, are nevertheless not avoided in the attempted discussion and fictional framing.

For a too brief moment, however, the Needcompany soars as only it can, in the joyous final dance sequence to the music of Hans Petter Dahl and Maarten Seghers. Some of the choreography and movement is riveting, particularly by Eléonore Valère, as the sister searching for her dead brother, while the pair created by Viviane De Muynck, as the mother, and Grace Ellen Barkey as her mentally retarded daughter, is genuinely moving. It seems however that world-weariness is not the Needcompany’s forté and it is to be hoped that they can put the evidently difficult task of remembering a loved one behind them and find a little more joy in their art, which they do so well. Show seen at Théâtre de la Ville.

Photo Credit: Maarten Vanden Abeele