In ‘Time for happiness’ of ITA, almost every character is a caricature

That a person who left can still be very present, because of the blemish who left his departure on what was left behind, ita knows all about that. In 2023, director Eline Arbo succeeded Ivo van Hove as the artistic director of the company. A year later, a report on cross -border behavior was published in the period that Van Hove led the company. For example, Arbo, outside of her knowledge, inherited a company with a scandal.

The show Time for happiness Is her attempt to mark a new start for the company, and to symbolically erase what should not have any room in it. To this end, she chose, in her own words, an « unprecedented » piece of the Norwegian theater and novelist Arne Lygre (1968), to « celebrate being together. » Idea and concept come from Arbo, Bianca van der Schoot signed for the direction.

In Time for happiness Meet a colorful collection of characters, who happened to have agreed on the same bench on a river. A mother and her daughter are waiting for their son/brother Aksle, who is normally never late. A widow is looking for a place with her two stepchildren to bury her husband. A woman tries to win back her ex-husband. They start talking to each other about themes such as love, parenting, forgiveness and mourning.

The hinge point in the piece is the moment when son/brother Aksle (Minne Koole) still appears, albeit to say goodbye again immediately. He longs for a place where he is not his ‘old self’, he explains. He wants to start again, Schone Lei, apart from the story that others have made him over time. This theme, the desire not to be defined by others, to be able to exist independently of definitions at all, is what Arbo and Van der Schoot seem to have addressed in the play. But the text that Lygre puts his characters in the mouth has too little depth to do justice to that theme.

It is as if the makers only found out halfway through the rehearsal process Time for happiness had a dragon of a piece. Van der Schoot made, perhaps for that reason, the rather rigorous choice to have the sometimes unashamedly, sometimes stunning hollow dialogues playing ‘on the irony’ in its entirety. The only character that is not set as a caricature is Aksle, but it is no more than 5 of the 160 minutes.

Immediately from the first turnout we look at cartoon characters; Strange exalted beings, weaned of any form of impulse suppression. At the slightest they burst into cry or shoot out of their shoe. The actors plunge into it with full dedication, which is brave, and here and there pretty witty. But, you ask yourself more and more: what is it going on?

Lygres sweet piece about connection, about celebrating being together (‘I hóúd from people!’ Calls of characters are excited), has become a genuine parody of a desire for connection in Van der Schoots staging. The highlight of the performance, in which a crowd of ITA employees suddenly steps up to play the pop song ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams, is so completely absurd that the scene gets a camp-like charm. It doesn’t save the show.

If the stain that Aksle left in the stage after two and a half hours of those insane, directionless scenes, eventually wiped away with extreme precision, it feels like a relief. Let this confusing chapter indeed be closed. Time for a clean slate.

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