Milo Rau's theatre plays of recent years have told a unique history of Flanders and Belgium. In Five Easy Pieces (2016) Rau reconstructed the story of the Dutroux affair with children. With Lam Gods (2018) he made a portrait of the Ghent urban society. With Familie – which premièred in 2019 a few weeks before the theatres went into lockdown – he used the collective suicide of a family to show western society on the brink of the abyss.

After a year of (semi) lockdown, of loneliness and closed cultural establishments, Milo Rau and his team take up a theme that has been at the centre of Rau's work for a long time : the question of parting, mourning and death but also of memory and solidarity, in dealing with the end. A piece about grief and beauty.

Next to two Flemish actors from the world-wide ensemble of NTGent – 28-year-old Arne de Tremerie and 70-year-old Johan Leysen – four other professional and non-professional actors are on stage. All of them have experienced death at close range : in their private life, because they accompanied someone into death, because they are very ill themselves or because they professionally deal with dying or dead people on a daily basis – or simply because they have already died many (theatre) deaths as an actor or a singer. Based loosely on the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice they tell their most personal stories about death and rebirth, art and love, memory and oblivion.

“The most influential artist of our time” (Die Zeit)

Aftertalk after the show, 22:00 (FR)

Programmation outside the walls of La rose des vents in Roubaix