How do you deal with your own transience? ‘Everyday loss’ is a dry -comic and throat of the throat

Suppose this is the very last performance that actor Willem de Wolf and actress Lineke Rijxman ever play. Is that bad? What would they want to tell?

Their dry -comic timing alone makes it a party to see this duo turn these questions for an hour and a half. The wolf, who, as a child, with that slow, precise dictation of him, seems to speak without a filter what shoots him through the mind. Rijxman, who puts her story with steel face and thereby skilfully meanders around the punchlines. Together they made the show Everyday loss – The Slow Accumulation of Ordinary Losses. About remembering, the melancholy of aging and the continuous loss that accompanies it.

The Wolf and Rijxman relate to memory, it depends to a certain extent of your past, how much you like to return to it. The wolf plunges into any association flow without restraint. By naming his memories here on the theater floor (of their collaborations, on the streets of his childhood, on the collar of his father’s coat), he hopes to be able to hold them. It is more than nostalgia, there is a bit of a bite behind it. The articulation of his memories is the Wolf’s way of wandering his fear of evaporating it.

De Wolf hopes to find itself on the floor, Rijxman hopes to lose himself there

Rijxman likes to move away from her memory as decisively as possible. Memories of the far too early death of her mother and of her violent father have made the past an unheimic domain for her. Where the theater for De Wolf is a place to show the truth, it may be a place for Rijxman « of temptation, falsification, liberation. »

The wolf is « showing what it’s like to be like, to » tell yourself «  ». For Rijxman, acting is about « the reassurance and shock of the area that falls outside of myself; De Wolf hopes to find itself on the floor, Rijxman hopes to lose himself there. Opposite motives, you would say, but not. For both, playing is of vital importance.

Ragged

Everyday loss Is a collage of scenes, pleasantly ragged on the edges. They are often witty (a dialogue in which the two – ‘hik!’ ‘Heel!’ – cannot come up with the word ‘haiku’), sometimes unashamedly pathetic (a ’tis sung by, all passed by’). And sometimes a scene grabs the throat. The one in which they play each other’s mother is beautiful. The Wolf is not sure if she will visit the show, she says, because she never understands her son’s performances so well. Through all the monsterness you feel the shame of the mother and indirectly the perhaps even more painful shame about it, of the son. There is a scene between the children who never received both actors, here too the tone is delighted and light, but with just below the surface, not to be missed, Rijxmans deep sorrow about it.

How on earth do you deal with your own transience? That universal despair is ultimately where all scenes make their way around. Perhaps, confronted with these types of bottomless questions, you can still consult at Haiku master Bashō:

« Oh old pond / a frog jumps in / sound of water. »

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