Theatre review: Polaroids (2011), Het huis van Bourgondië

We are all on a a raft, floating on the ocean, destination unknown.

Fear is a best man friend, John Cale sings. At the beginning of the play we see the five actors playfully run around, as if they cannot wait to start playing. At the same time we hear a voice over, speaking it is not courage that is important, but how to deal with fear. Later on, before the final confrontation between Nick, a socialist activist, and the bankdirector, who he tried to kill fifteen years ago, we hear that voice over again, saying we can let fear defeat us or keep on going and taking it with us.

The play starts with Nick coming out of jail and meeting his former girlfriend Helen. She is not an activist anymore, but a member of the London council. It is wonderful to see the insecurity between them. Nick needs clothes and a place to stay, but despites her job in the council and Helen still loves him and wants to help him, but still doesn’t like the way he behaves. She already promised him to stay in her house, but at the end of the scene she says she doesn’t want to see him anymore.

In the next scene the young girl Nadia had a great conversation in simple English with Victor, a Russian go-go dancer with a perfect body, who has been bought by Tim, a gay man with Aids. Nadia is a new age type. She forgives before she knows what someone has done and says everybody is good, while for Victor, who shows her a polaroid of his impressive cock, there is no good but just fun and trash.

These are the persons that circle around eachother during one hour and a half in a wonderful vivid way with lots of humour. On the quite empty stage with only a slope, Nadia rolls down a few times, suggesting the fysical violence against her by her boyfriend. The British Mark Ravenhill, who wrote Some explicit polaroids in 1999, chose very interesting caracters trying to cling to eachother. They are not stereotypes. During the play their points of view change. Even Nick, the socialist, stops acting angry towards the capitalist world. The bankdirector invites him to accompagny him to Eastern Europe to help people with the money he earned with banking.

During the informal discussion at the end with the young director Casper Vandeputte, who did a great job already with Till the fat lady sings (see February 13 on this blog) and the actors, Vincent van der Valk (Tim) said that there was a last scene in which we see Helen and Nick living peacefully together, but they chose not to show that, because it would be pathetic.

What does it all mean? The bankdirector says at the end to Nadia that the capitalist system still is the best there is to satisfy our individual needs and later on he sees us all floating on a raft in a destination unknown. Ravenhill wrote this play eleven years ago in a time when history was abolished and socialists didn’t  knew in which direction to go. At least Ravenhill shows that no one is as bad as we think thing he is, that fun is not everlasting and that the world is a dangerous but worthy place to be.

Text and acting together created theatre at its best. This play deserves many more performances in the new theatre season than the fifteen of this month.