Jan Lauwers presents Place du Marché 76, a carnivalesque play that humorously stages characters hit by ongoing tragedies... In Cuba, there is a proverb that says: “Small village, great hell”. This proverb ought to exist in Belgium. Jan Lauwers’ troupe brings it to life by electrifying the cloister of Carmes for over two hours fifteen minutes. Jan Lauwers was born in Antwerp, the city of Rubens. One day, a madwoman there ripped open the portrait of Hélène Fourment, the painter’s young wife, just as one violates the face of a prostitute. Lauwers presented a memorable show at Avignon, in 2004: Isabella’s Room. It stretches the limits of violence very far, not to mention those of ugliness, and the comic, such that the play can only be great or a failure. Place du Marché 76 is no failure. It is the story of a village, of its dramas, its crimes, its inhabitants, its loves and its deaths. A joyous macabre dance under conspicuous spotlights, predominantly orange ones, like the colour of the Dutch football team’s jerseys. There are brooms, mops, badly pitched mics, a raft of horrible pneumatic animals, a death whose living skeleton dangles and protests, songs as false and as right as the deepest moans. It is at once a musical comedy, a televised sketch, a reality show, a variety show, an episode of the programme Strip-Tease, a snuff movie, a comic strip, the foire du Trône, a film by Ken Russell or by the Dogma group. Things really get going now and refuse to let up. When he is not playing the electric guitar seated, Lauwers presents the plot, the characters and the feelings on stage – like in Gotlib’s comic strips, in which the author intervenes to set at a distance all that he brings near by a reductio ad absurdum: the scorn of distantiation. The oil of the mayonnaise comes right from the Belgian surrealist ateliers: eye of eagle and footprint of wild boar, naturalness of the act, of farce and of the insult, all giving way to poor taste, that inalterable proof of the existence of others – a revolutionary sensitivity. In four seasons, all is shown like it is in some phantom train: accidents, suicide, murder, rape, incest, sequestration, misery, lynching, grief, prostitution, corpses, and birth. It’s all whimsically comical. Alice Cooper The show begins with a half-baked ceremony. A drama having occurred a year earlier is commemorated. One of the butcher’s gas bottles had exploded. There were twenty-four deaths in all, including seven children, the butcher’s among them. His wife remained paralyzed ever since. She gets about in a wheelchair. Says the Myope, an oddball in orange overalls looking like Alice Cooper will flatten her tires. She would like to screw, to die. Her husband will suffocate her with a pillow. For the moment, she is alive. Alfred, the plumber, is the perverse drunkard of the village. He’s the type of guy one avoids at the end of the ball. He’s a pain in the arse. The commemoration takes place around the fountain, which is 400 years old and no longer working. It has been baptized with love. Blood will be found in it soon. The village, like many villages, is a raft and a ship of fools. During the celebration, Pauline, the baker’s daughter, disappears. Alfred has kidnapped her, and locked her up in the catacombs under the fountain. She will only be seen again 76 days later. Sperm Below, he undresses her, turns her around, does things to her and makes her scream. We see Alfred naked, hairy, going from the forestage into the televised wings: a small screen shows us what he is doing to Pauline. Beside this, on the stage, Pauline’s mother cries and gets the puppet of her other child, Oscar, to talk. A little earlier Oscar had thrown himself out the window. Oscar had jerked off in front of Pauline, the sperm spurted and he killed himself. His puppet advises his sister as she is confronted with her executioner: “He’s a shitty fly! Crush him! Find the keys! Now, save yourself!” She has her awareness, her violence, her freedom. The puppet does better than simply make the images bearable: what is obscene becomes deeply moving. By the time Pauline has managed to save herself, her mother has jumped from the top of the bridge. It’s like being in a Natascha Kampusch, or a Dutroux story, in a fairytale with no bell to ring. But it’s a comedy too. In the meantime, the play takes ten new twists, like a sitcom from hell. Among others, Alfred is put to death, and the villagers lock up his Korean wife, for 76 days, as atonement for her complicity. However, anyone can let her out whenever they want, should they think that she has been punished long enough: this sharing of collective responsibility perturbs the village even more. Who is up to dispensing justice? Who is up to taking on personal responsibility for having accepted or inflicted it? It all ends with the birth of a fatherless child that Alfred’s widow had with one of the villagers, since she’s become a hooker. The new born is an inflatable doll, two metres tall. Here, the piled-up dead come back to talk, to protest and to mock. They are interactive like the television viewers of certain TV programmes, like Scottish phantoms. They might be saying: “Human brothers who live after us / Do not have (your) hearts hardened against us”. But, contrary to those of Francois Villon, they do not excuse themselves. What we see on the stage, in spirit and in mood, is exactly that marvellous poem by Queneau, The Living and the Dead [Les Vivants et les Morts]: “The living and the dead have big ears / The living and the dead hear the water sleeping / The living and the dead have voices peerless / The living and the dead are beings sonorous / The living and the dead take to the bottle / The living and the dead are not inodorous / The living and the dead watch each other / The living and the dead exchange their passports.”