In ‘Circle Mirror Transformation’, the everyday way is made in a comical way

The exercise is that you can only use one word, but that you make sentences through the tone and your attitude that make clear what you mean. The man, defensive, slow: « Akma … Akma … ». The woman, sad, reproachful: « Goulash … goulash-goulash. » They keep it up for minutes. What was that conversation about the course leader then asks two other, watching students. Anger, says one, in love, the other believes.

It is a witty example of the silly games and exercises that four students do during a six -week drama course. In the performance Circle Mirror Transformation It is all about the mutual dynamics and growing intimacy between the four: the uncertain teen (Sayo Cadmus), the energetic thirties (Jip Smit), the closed 40s (Michiel Nooter) and the timid fifties (Gustav Borreman), also the man of course leader Marti (Marisa van Eyle), also the man.

Marti wants to teach her students to be aware of each other and of herself. If they also act, the teenager wonders after a few weeks, because she actually came for that. But Marti swears by playful teaching materials, without stage text. Thanks to those exercises, bottlenecks and struggles playfully come up in the bare lesson room – curtains for mirrors, a few benches.

Inability

For example, she lets the four replay each other and they have to let the others imitate crucial scenes from their lives. That does not expose large conflicts: a relationship break, arguing parents. The relationships in the group are just as little pronounced: in love with flames briefly and there is unspoken anger and irritation. Yet something has shifted after six weeks, almost careless, because that is how things go, but fundamentally.

That attention for the everyday makes this text by the American playwright Annie Baker special. Baker views the inability of people to shape their desire with mild gaze. This results in a funny display at times, which is not unpleasant, but is also on the long side with two hours.

In his direction, with which he concludes his development process at Toneelschuur Producties, Loek de Bakker dares to look for the silence, but he also makes too little work of the harrowing undercurrent in this search for love and security. With a little more detail and finesse, these not special people had just become a bit more special.

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