The Belgian Needcompany performed the much-acclaimed drama Das Hirschhaus ("The Deer House"), specially written for the Salzburg Festival, on Perner Island in Hallein. "Nobody writes his own history", says Viviane during the performance. She is not just the mother and grandmother of the stage family. She is also the magnificent actress Viviane de Muynck, the head of this theatre company and family on tour from one country to the next. Their present stop is Salzburg. Jan Lauwers and his Needcompany from Belgium, a theatre company consisting of actors, dancers, musicians and writers of different nationalities have produced their latest work, Das Hirschhaus, specially for the Salzburg Festival. The premiere took place of Perner Island in Hallein. The drama is the third part of the trilogy "Sad Faces/Happy Faces - Three Stories about the Human Character", that can be seen as a whole as from Friday. However Das Hirschhaus is a production in its own right. The appealing warehouse offers a wide, bright and symbolic stage. White deer and antlers, heads or legs bedeck the stage or come flying down from above, all part of the performance. Plus trolleys with white towels and other paraphernalia like animal ears which the actors stick to their heads one after another. A cloakroom rail with weird hairy clothes into which the actors and dancers climb at a later stage. A grand piano. Three platforms on wheels, to be used as tables, beds or podiums as needs be. At the start, it’s nothing but a theatre backstage. Actors come together, telling their strange and tragic tales of what they have experienced on their travels. Tijen, the dancer, is just back from Kosovo, where she has been looking for traces of her brother, killed while working as a war photographer. She has brought back with her a little book, containing the dead man’s notes and the last sentence saying he must find the deer house. This is the point where fiction sets in. It is also the beginning of the second act. The story of a family in a remote area of Kosovo earning its keep by breeding deer. The normal day-to-day human catastrophes are interrupted by the catastrophe of war – the daughter Inge is murdered by Benoit, a Western war photographer forced to make a choice as to whether two people – mother and child – are to be killed, or the child to be saved by himself shooting the mother. He takes the latter choice, bringing the slain mother back to her home. Viviane puts him up in her house. But the question remains. Who will punish him, the murderer and who will punish his murderer. Nobody can excuse himself from living, no member of the family remains free of guilt. And the overriding theme is the grief connected with people dying. But it is also the celebration of life, the solidarity within the family, the family which suddenly becomes the theatre company. Viviane, as the mother and grandmother, bears the suffering, which she herself has nothing to do with, with humility and fortitude, and with her eternally strong, forgiving love of the dead Inge, whose stiff body she dresses and decorates, and her same love of her mentally retarded daughter Grace who clairvoyantly saves the deer from the breaking ice. It’s Christmas Eve. A great meal has been prepared as a Last Supper, the final mourning. There’s dancing and singing on the cleared stage – before the next catastrophe unfolds over them, a continuation of the plot. Everything is performed with impressive clarity and in the highest poetic terms, full of grief yet without ever becoming sentimental and full of humour that just happens as a result of the situation on stage and by making up optimistic tales about a possible future. It’s an evening at the theatre bearing an artistic tribute to the survivors and the dead. Moving, enlightening, and very buoyant. A plot mingling fact and fiction. A stage setting both fairy-tale and completely modern. The fact that every actor and dancer speaks in his own language just seems logical. Supertitles in German provide comprehension. A big applause for this premiere.