One cannot really miss street-cleaners, which is after all why they wear those bright orange work-clothes. And yet they are barely seen – in the provincial town they no more than extras who do not really belong. Which is why the two street-cleaners whom the Belgian theatre-maker Jan Lauwers brings to the stage in his play Marketplace 76 allow themselves all sorts of liberties. They can be vulgar, or cheerful, or impertinent, or rebellious – one of them even falls straight out of the sky in a rubber boat, and so comes from another world. All the other citizens appear to be the ‘undead’, without feelings, without joy and without a future. What happened is that a year previously there had been a terrible accident, a gas explosion. It killed 24 people, including a lot of children. Since then the town has been paralysed by grief, rage and self-doubt. Then, on the arrest of a paedophile who has tormented a young girl for 76 days in a cellar under the marketplace, the aggression explodes. The culprit is knocked down and then drowned in the fountain. After that he is hung up in a noose. His wife, who knew all about it, is bricked up and has to atone for 76 days. Marketplace 76 is a play about perversions and horrific deeds, and about how it is possible to live with each other in spite of all this. More and more of the inhabitants gradually start to wear the bright orange of the street-cleaners – they thereby put aside their drab conventionality so as to rediscover love, joy and utopia. One could probably, but incorrectly, take this message as sugary-sweet or esoteric, but Jan Lauwers and his company have nothing to do with social kitsch. They see themselves more in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, an acting style from the fifties that is actually long outmoded. But in Jan Lauwers’ case, the devices from Brecht’s era turn out still to be just as disruptive, surprising and gripping as back then. A moderator introduces the story and then provides descriptions of the various locations. The actors step out of character, come together to sing songs, dance, grumble about unreliable stage technics, and interrupt each other – what one in the past tended to call the alienation effect now provides deliberately comical intermezzos. Jan Lauwers does of course have an educational message; he wants to convey his idea of utopia and therefore moves in the sphere of children’s and youth theatre. This probably causes many people some irritation. But Lauwers has grasped the art of exposing the souls of his characters by means of drastic yet poetic images. The dead and the living perform side by side – because the deceased do not let go of the town: not the child who jumped out of a window, nor the woman who threw herself off a railway bridge. Ultimately it is precisely the woman who has been bricked in and condemned to make atonement who brings the paralysing trauma to an end. The men of the town visit her in the same way as one might go to a prostitute, and thereby learn to accept the existence of feelings once again. The street-cleaners’ orange becomes the signal for a shared and happier future. This is definitely no good for cultural pessimists and those spectators who have lost any belief in a better world. Everyone else finds life in all its splendid horror on this Marketplace 76.