Jan Lauwers and his Needcompany, currently Artists in Residence in Vienna, make quite an impression with Marketplace 76 What an old-fashioned blessing: the new production by Jan Lauwers’ Needcompany is not performed on the internet. Nor does it rely on a mysterious location or one or other remote and godforsaken setting, where, in a contrived way, it then puts some minority on stage to claim its rights. Marketplace 76 is the chronicle of a clearly structured village community. Its dimensions coincide with the space offered by the Kasino at Schwarzenbergplatz. The sequence of acts and scenes is marked by the course of the seasons. An ash-grey MC (Jan Lauwers, author and director) appears and introduces himself as ‘Sergeant Pepper’. He hoarsely gives us the coordinates: ‘A small village at the foot of a mountain. Remote. Poverty reigns here. The people feel troubled.’ The village these people live in is indeed the least pleasurable place one could imagine. Evidently a terrible accident took place here a year previously. A gas cylinder exploded. Twenty-four people were killed, including seven children. The villagers cope with their grief by making their commemoration of the dead into a ritual. The members of the Belgian Needcompany, currently Artists in Residence at the Burgtheater in Vienna, make this only sketchily outlined community matter throb and bloom. Of course, Lauwers and his brothers-in-arms don’t for a moment believe in the existence of a place, favoured by God, off which all calamity bounces harmlessly. But they do avoid being too clever: they don’t present us with a sociological treatise. This is because each one of the individual characters is disruptive and does not fit into the exemplary pattern. This night of terrifying theatre teaches us that every community consists of anomalies. As a victim of the explosion, the butcher’s wife (Anneke Bonnema) is in a wheelchair and misses her husband’s embraces (Benoît Gob). She cannot reconcile herself to the fact that as a result of her helplessness she is no longer sexually attractive. The way these two exchange glances to stimulate a desire that is no longer present as such: it is this sort of minimal switch of meaning that made the premiere of Marketplace 76 so captivating. The crisis the community is enduring can also be understood in a more general way. In the village, a platform covering an old fountain provides an acting area. A child (a doll) falls out of a window. His mother (Grace Ellen Barkey) has to throw up. Two dustmen dressed in orange clean up the mess: Sweeper and Squinty put forward an alternative society that reminds us that even the quietest place has its marginal characters. Marketplace 76 describes a point where several traditions intersect. The approach is reminiscent of epic theatre. The stigmatisation of true or supposed outsiders reminds us of Lars von Trier’s Dogville. However, a blessed lightening of meaning prevails over all the fountain pillars and piles of artificial snow. A rebellious girl is abducted and abused. The culprit, an inhibited plumber with an asthma spray, suffers the kiss of death when he is lynched. While this small village community falls apart, he dances the dance of survival, naked and painted as a skeleton. The dead have their place and a voice in Jan Lauwers’ wonderland. A profoundly human place, that deserves all the applause it gets.