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Belgian Playwriting: ''for better or for mirth''
 

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"