A Sublime Mistake — played by Gonzalo Cunill — is a new character based on all the slightly lost male characters in Jan Lauwers’ oeuvre. An intimate portrait of a man who looks at the world in astonishment and fails to understand why he is even part of it.

Lauwers’ best-known plays include ‘Isabella’s room’, ‘The Lobster Shop’, ‘Morning Song’,‘Ulrike’ and ‘The Snakesong Trilogy’, alongside many others. His entire oeuvre is essentially a quest to sketch as complete a portrait as possible of the person he is collaborating with at the time. In fact, the character and the person who brings the character to life are of equal importance to Lauwers. Lauwers’ writing really gets into the skin of his characters as individuals, always seeking to transcend contemporary dogmas when it comes to diversity and identity. In doing so, he puts human nature front and centre. Failure, love, struggle, and woes big and small are always given a special place.

Jan Lauwers: This play is about friendship. The three portraits in this story are parts of myself, based on my earlier theatre work and the friendships that I have cherished over the course of my work. It is also clear that Gonzalo was sat grinning somewhere in a corner of my studio as I wrote the play.

In ‘A Sublime Mistake’ one of the characters says that it is far more difficult to be always angry than to hide behind a smile. With this play I have tried to see this smile no longer as an act of cowardice, but as a weapon in defence of humankind itself.