Does any artist still dare talk about love these days? About that sentimental extension of the middle-class mentality? That feeling of marital bliss that’s paved with compromises. Or, even worse, romantic love, Sehnsucht, which the cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek compares with a Kinder Surprise Egg: I don’t actually want the egg, only the extra that is hidden somewhere inside it. And to get to it I am quite happy to smash you to pieces. ‘Been there, done that’, says the average theatre-maker. Nowadays love is no longer suitable for the stage. It is too explicit, too sensual, too touchy-feely. Not a weapon for the intellectual aesthete or the political activist. One is in serious danger of lapsing into romantic cliches, be they sugary or bloody. And that is the last thing any contemporary theatre-maker wants to be associated with. So love goes out of the window, unless it ends up in the impossible hands of Josse De Pauw, or lies concealed in the tangle of Marcel Proust’s brilliant reflections. And yet there is occasionally a theatre-maker who takes up the challenge, tacking between the overly personal and the painfully recognisable. Who dares to show love in all its truth and lies, in all its male and female vulnerability. In The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny, Hans Petter Dahl and Anneke Bonnema have written the chronicle of a lost era. Their exhibitionistically exposed bodies breathe the last breath of an era of free sex and hallucinogenic foolishness. But in the meantime the war is raging outside and the excited sweat of the sixties has cooled to form a clammy second skin that envelops their glorious bodies like a straitjacket. What remains is banality, boredom, fear and despair. But this has done nothing to diminish love. The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny Compared to the youthful rapture of Ijs, the love in The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny has already more than won its spurs. No great gestures here, just the restrained monotony of a relationship in which there are by now no more illusions to be maintained. Anneke Bonnema and Hans Petter Dahl stand alone on a virtually empty stage, accompanied only by a simple rhythm box. Their pop opera is a barely audible echo of the enthusiastic innocence and pathos of the rock ‘n roll years and of the belief in ultimate deliverance. The monotonous performance of the songs prevents you from losing yourself in emotion. The two protagonists work their way through their repertoire unmoved: rhythm box on, rhythm box off. The sound is mechanical, the voices restrained and flat. No rock machismo. No adrenalin. No testosterone. Only the essence. Two voices. One rhythm. Which unrelentingly drives on the normality of boredom, loss, and silent despair. This does not make The Ballad of Ricky and Ronny a despondent piece. It is certainly melancholy, but without any form of pathos. The rock duets smoulder somewhere between Nico and Leonard Cohen. Dry as dust, stripped of all their gentle seduction, they reveal only the mercilessness of the ordinary. Of a love that has more than exceeded its own bounds. It is precisely the two actors’ restrained performance, and their decision to dampen the rock element of the show to the point of boredom, that make this piece so powerful. Every song exudes memories, but at the same time expresses the deficit of a lost faith. Ricky and Ronny were children of their time, one thinks. They sought salvation in religion and politics, but not genuinely. In faith and nature, but without much conviction. They are the first generation to have cut sex free from reproduction. And now, so many years later, they are trying to reconcile themselves to the emptiness of their aspirations. Ronny endeavours to make one more futile attempt at subversion by whingeing his way across the stage in high heels with a stocking on his head. Ricky squeezes into a sexy club outfit, which leaves no aspect of her well-shaped posterior to the imagination. But their fantasies ultimately result in no more than small-minded nonsense. Fear increasingly takes over from the imagination. In the beginning the performance still adheres to the recognisability of the tired and repetitive life of a couple, but The Ballad gradually evolves towards absurd lunacy. It starts with an innocent hallucination: one evening, Ronny sees the ghost of a child sit down at the table during a cosy candlelit dinner. He calls his imaginary child ‘Freedom’, and gives him a room in their expanding and increasingly labyrinthine house. Ricky also increasingly loses herself in the notion of their shapeless afterbirth. The only information the audience receives about the child comes from the pop songs, whose language departs further and further from any recognisable reality. At one point Freedom takes the form of an immature sexual organ in a deathbed of sperm. At another he is no more than a gust of wind that chills the whole house. Or a couple of dark clouds that insinuate the threat of war into their narcissistic lives. Freedom is a child who does not appear to have been born out of lust, but out of loss. Out of the unassimilated mourning for the hope that never came true. Not so much the mourning for a lost love, the one you lost somewhere over the course of time. Nor the mourning for an ideology, political convictions or philosophical twaddle, because they are never mentioned. But the mourning for the more ordinary belief that shaped a whole human life on the basis of these theories: the belief in freedom, and in a sexuality that would throw every boundary open. And yes, in love. Perhaps they do still believe in each other, but they no longer believe that this bond can save them from the outside world. Ricky and Ronny is the story of a contemporary love, which is still vibrating after the shockwave of the past. It is the story of a lost innocence, of people who float around lost like flakes of snow. Human snowflakes that flutter downwards from blocks of flats. That is the one image of the Twin Towers that no one will ever forget. But in The Ballad the bodies never reach the ground. The words, and also the surprising closing scene with its cartoon film, show us these flakes as innocent, comforting groundcover plants, as sperm cells in space, as stars in the Milky Way. Hans Petter Dahl and Anneke Bonnema skate on the boundary between the ordinary and the absurd, and between love and alienation. The intimacy expressed in their presence on stage is a sample of vulnerability that is only very rarely to be found in the theatre.