This production’s mascot sits at the director’s feet downstage left: a big toy dog. So it does in fact give a name to the location, the village that remains anonymous, poor and remote somewhere in the provinces: Dogville. The comparison is intentional. In Marketplace 76, Jan Lauwers and his Needcompany stage a reflection of Lars von Trier’s film Dogville. When reversed, the negative image of a society becomes a positive image. An allegory. A manifesto. An ordeal of Biblical proportions – which applies to both these examples. And in both cases it is unmistakably a game. ‘Only theatre,’ as Lauwers proclaims. To refresh your memory: in Dogville, the small town, the streets and the interiors of the houses are all marked out in chalk lines. An American idyll illuminated by studio spots. It’s all ‘in the wings’ and is made recognisable as such. In the fashion of Brecht. Epic. Anti-illusionary. An invitation to reflect. In this story man has no pity. In Dogville he leads a dog’s life and it brings him down. As it does the main character, Grace, who holds a merciless day of judgement just as Brecht’s Seeräuber-Jenny does. A film to horrify. Marketplace of suffering souls In Lauwers’ case, however, in the Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum, it’s some sort of appalling entertainment. The Belgian performance artist, also a homo ludens, conjuror and wandering scholar, constructs a social experiment. It takes some time before the roles become clear. It’s true that on the marketplace of this village of pain with its suffering inhabitants things are so jolly that it almost becomes too much – but at the same time very violent too, after 24 people, including lots of children, died in a gas explosion a year before. Now, a year later, a memorial ceremony is being held – coping with grief – on the square with its fountain (dedicated to Venus under the name ‘Fons Amoris’). And also to disentangle themselves from these suffocating memories, as the unsentimental drama queen Tracy does in a furious song. But there is no end to the catastrophes: incest, child abuse, murder, suicide, active euthanasia. Experiment in orange As if it were a signal, a deep and potent Buddhist orange colour spreads out over the stage. This is the colour street-cleaners wear, the ones who clear up the waste of our civilised society. Mostly immigrants, some illegal, foreigners or others suffering deprivation of one sort or another, whom Lauwers sees as the new slave class. One street-cleaner gets a new colleague who falls unannounced from the sky, but actually it is more likely that he had just run aground in his rubber boat (which is richly adorned with inflatable plastic fish). A boat refugee. A black man, black sheep and scapegoat. Society lets off steam by stigmatising him. But the monster is lurking elsewhere: in the plumber Alfred, who abducts the girl Pauline and abuses her for 76 days. Later he will crawl like an animal on his hands and knees, and then be drowned, shat on by a gull and hanged on a lighting stand; later still he makes a return. Because the dead dance along too, singing their songs, like the skeletons in a Mexican ritual. Obscenities and calamities There is a moment when the staging gains density and urgency, and that is when we see on a monitor how the victim, Pauline, lies in a tormenting tussle in her hell, the cave of her torturer, who is based on the Belgian Marc Dutroux. The indirect picture, the representation, the (television) picture reproduced through the media, probably touches us more than direct observation. The plumber has a wife too, who is sentenced to do penance as his accomplice. At the same time, as an erotic liberator, she brings salvation and blessing to the men of the village and delivers them from their sexual blockage. A mother goddess, in other words, a Korean woman called Kim-Ho. This show, which at two and a half hours is pushing at the limit, is movingly naïve, and as spirited as a gospel; it is also a little like a parody, sometimes slightly mischievous, yet it recites very properly the lessons of its avant-garde vocabulary; mostly farcical and humorous, even as far as the obscenities and calamities are concerned: as if it were a puppet-show by Jan Klaassen and Company. In the case of Lars von Trier, who is able to postulate the dogma of a new style that is properly related to his morality and makes a synthesis of form and content, the structuring principle is part of the inhumanity. In the case of Needcompany it is precisely the unordered, transient and confused elements that lead to a humane reconciliation played out with emotion. In the epilogue, the big mother gives birth to a gigantic baby, while the fatherhood is collective. And what does it matter that it looks like a bombastic lolly. Our village has become a finer place, fertile, communicative, psychologically liberated and pure. But this purity first has to be dragged through the mud.