*****

Needcompany’s The blind poet is a portrait of a company that shares the highs and lows of a tour of the world’s stages like a close-knit family. At the same time, it is a blazing criticism of the narrow-mindedness of contemporary Europe. But above all, it is two hours of fantastic, stimulating, moving, funny, tragic theatre.

Grace Ellen Barkey sets the tone straight away when she climbs onto the stage to present a portrait of herself. She wears traditional Indonesian clothing and a crown on her head, but her face is made up like a European clown. Her oversized shoes are also more suited to a clown than to a dancer.

But she’s oblivious to all that. She relishes the sound of her name, and repeats it in every possible key, from gracious to tough to raw. She goes faster and faster, until, screaming and stamping her feet, she’s chanting her name, egged on by the ensemble in the orchestra pit.

Barkey regards this kind of crazy self-glorification as entirely normal, as she identifies herself as a multicultural marvel, with Indonesian, Chinese, German and Dutch blood running through her veins. Mohamed Toukabri offers his unsolicited opinion: ‘You may be a multicultural marvel, but I am the purest monoculture’, before making himself scarce.

After this, Jan Lauwers gives the stage to Maarten Seghers for a spot of self-congratulation. But things turn out rather differently. His family tree, which features forty generations of blacksmiths, takes him back to the Middle Ages and the Crusades. It’s a bitter tale of knights who devour children because horses are too valuable. This is vividly illustrated by a dead horse laid out on a gigantic lever.

Before the interval, Hans Petter Dahl and Anna Sophia Bonnema also make an appearance. Dahl is the archetypical boastful, rugged Viking. But there’s a fly in the ointment here too: he once let someone drown because he was too stoned or too scared to dive into the water. These are not true heroes, despite the noise they make and their boasts about impressive histories and cultural supremacy.

Anna Sophia Bonnema talks about this in her portrait before the interval: ‘I am everyone, and the world is me. And that’s why it’s good to talk only about ourselves. Because that is the true history. That is the true love. Everything else is a forgery.’ Meaning that all that twaddle about identity is merely a justification for the narrow-mindedness and weakness that we are unable to deal with.

After the interval, it’s pure spectacle again when Benoît Gob swaggeringly describes his youth, even though his is a tragic tale of neglect. Here, the ensemble is at its best: it supports this street-fighter’s epic from the orchestra pit with thundering guitars. For a moment, the multicultural theme seems to have vanished, but it is brought back in force by Jules Beckman, an American of Russian-Jewish origin. Who, it would seem, did not have the happiest of childhoods either.

In the meantime, two giant objects roll onto the stage: abstract chess pieces that attack each other with lances. Now we’re thrust once again into the Middle Ages and the Crusades. Mohamed Toukabri is the last to respond to this, with the most confusing self-portrait of them all. He comes across as a flashy Tunisian who can’t resist answering his mobile even when he’s on stage. It’s all cliché. It’s what we see when we see Arabs.

However, when he delves deeper into his history, he discovers a poem by the blind poet Abu al’ala al Ma’arri (973-1053). Back then, the poet was already enjoining us not to blame the world for the things that haunt us. This is precisely what Lauwers wants to make us feel. With a final fantastical, ghostly image, he leaves the audience feeling perplexed.