This issue of Actes du Théâtre
focuses on a region that has produced a particularly
rich crop of French-language playwrights. The French-speaking
community in Belgium, also known as Wallonie-Bruxelles,
has been remarkably active recently in the field of
playwriting. Here is a report on some of the new writers
growing out of this flourishing creative hub.
In Wallonie, the French-speaking southern part of
Belgium forced to assert its identity with the rise
of the Flemish-controlled north, a new tone for theatre
was set in the 1960s by Jean Louvet. He was the first
to project a critical vision of society staged in
a more realistic manner. He saw how much the economic
depression had also created the threat of a break-up
in family and clan ties; and he saw the conflicts
that were emerging within couples, that minimal society
in which codes were being completely modified. As
a result, his style of theatre can be described as
both intimate and political. You can see it in his
latest work, Ma nuit est plus profonde que la tienne,
in which our modern-day malaise is evoked with great
economy by a man, a woman and a piano tuner, whose
job is to find perfect harmony and who is faced with
a clash between the sexes
Louvet is a pioneer who has had a deep impact on contemporary
Walloon society and its forms of artistic expression.
The Dardenne brothers, who made the films Rosetta
and Le Fils, owe a great deal to him, and even dedicated
a film to him. The same is true for Jean-Marie Piemme,
who was the dramaturg for some of Louvet's plays before
writing his own and developing into an increasingly
prolific and sharp playwright. His play Toréadors,
a hit in Belgian theatres, is an amazingly condensed
social observation on Belgium's openness to the flow
of immigrants in Europe since the fall of Communism.
Who is the slyest and most perverse, the North African
who thinks he has assimilated or the refugee from
Eastern Europe who brings along the crafty ways he
developed to deal with arbitrariness? Their private
conversation - which began on an impromptu note -
turns out to be a ruthless fight in the arena of modern
challenges.
Paul Emond has long known that theatre, the art of
speech, must allow the flow of words to go on while
dismantling it from inside. That is what happens in
Inaccessibles amours, whose title heralds a kind of
western Kundera, attentive to the cracks that tell
so much about people who, under the guise of triumphant
individu- alism, are manipulated by the system.
A different kind of vision runs through Adolphe Nysenholc's
plays, where the holocaust is shifted onto a metaphysical
level, provoking giddy laughter. Mère de guerre
is so tragic that you have to laugh. The depth of
the wound arouses images in which the grotesque becomes
an outlet, as in Ensor's work. The Belgian specificity
also lies in the sniggering approach to things that
are irreparable. You can see this guffawing attitude
to being on the edge of the void in Laurent Van Wetter's
plays. In Le Pont, a first play that has brought to
light this seasoned actor and playwright, he turned
a trial run into a masterpiece, illustrating a writing
movement that grew out of the intense improvisation
work done by young Belgian actors.
Another very active sector of theatre life in Belgium
- for young audiences - has also enriched this new
playwriting movement. One example is Éric Durnez,
whose early plays were written for children and teenagers
and who has gained wider audiences by fine-tuning
his work. The result is a sensitive play such as La
Douce- Amère, which has revived magical realism,
an aesthetic movement that runs through Belgian literature.
Jean-Pierre Dopagne is currently the Belgian playwright
whose reputation is spreading the fastest throughout
the French-speaking world. Could it be due to the
precise composition in the plays written by this author
who is also a musician? He has mainly written monologues,
but with Le Vieil Homme rangé he has created
a very poignant sonata for two voices in which he
shows the misunderstandings on which blood ties are
woven in our fanatically selfish world. Philippe Blasband
displays a similar structural precision, acquired
in the editing room. This gifted writer has shown
remarkable virtuosity in several of his novels. He
is the most in demand of current Belgian screenwriters
(he wrote Une liaison pornographique), and has just
directed his first film. He has proved in several
of his plays, including Les Mangeuses de chocolat,
that a comedy is an acting machine whose parts needs
to be tightly constructed, ''for better or for mirth''.
The intense theatre world that characterises French-speaking
Belgium was in need of playwrights to ensure its continuity
and influence. The plays brought together here, all
published or scheduled to be published by Émile
Lansman, the Walloon publisher who is one of the driving
forces in French-language theatre, attest to the literary
side of this unquestionable dynamic.
Jacques De Decker, President of "Beaumarchais"
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