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by Guy Cassiers, Dirk Roofthooft & Corien Baart, directed by Guy Cassiers

Toneelhuis and Ro Theater (Rotterdam), NAC, Ottawa

January 16-19, 2013

“Nulle chose n’existe qui n’en touche une autre”.

Rouge décanté is the disturbing story of a child who survived life in a Japanese concentration camp in Java during World War II.  The story is adapted by acclaimed Flemish director Guy Cassiers with Dirk Roofthooft and Corien Baart from the 1981 autobiographical novel Bezonken Rood (“Sunken Red”) by Flemish author Jeroen Brouwers.  Brouwers, like his narrator, was born in Batavia (now Jakarta), the capital of the former Dutch East Indies.  When the Japanese invaded in 1943, he and his mother were transferred to the infamous Tjideng camp in a suburb of Jakarta where the five-year-old Brouwers, like his narrator, witnessed atrocities against women the memory of which continued to destroy his relations with women in his adult life.  It is a brilliant production that takes us on a deeply disquieting journey into a troubled mind.   

The 100-minute-long show opens with actor Dirk Roofthooft as the Narrator meticulously giving himself a pedicure.  The point of this atypical male indulgence and of his periodically croaking like a frog does not become clear until much later.  The initial focus of the play is the Narrator’s reflections on when he learned that his aged mother had died after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease.  What he is trying to explain to us (since the play is written as if the Narrator had an invisible listener) is why he felt absolutely nothing at the death of a woman who was so important in his life and, indeed, helped keep his spirits up when they were both interned in Tjideng.  The Narrator does not attend her funeral and cremation but instead drives out into the countryside where he breathes in the air thinking: “Le vent, c’est la vie de quelqu’un” (“The wind is someone’s life”).

Gradually we see that the Narrator has also had a stormy relationship with his first adult love Lisa and that witnessing the birth of his first child did not bind him to his wife but repelled him because of all the blood involved.  Inevitably his thoughts about his loss of feeling in the present and his constant need for pills to prevent his anxiety attacks lead him back to the events that occurred in Tjideng.

After the Japanese invaded Batavia, they separated all the male Dutch nationals and boys over age 12 from the women and children.  The age for the boys was later dropped to 10.  The males were sent to prisoner of war camps, the women and children to Tjideng.  Girls over 16 were sent away to become “comfort women”.  Tjideng was a simply a suburb of Jakarta that the Japanese cordoned off from the rest of the city.  In 1943 there only about 2500 prisoners known as “guests of the Emperor” but by 1945 there were 14,350 and the size of the camp had been decreased by one quarter to only 1000 yards square.  There was no attempt to maintain standards of nutrition or hygiene in the camp.  Cassiers does not mention the fact that an estimated 17-20 prisoners died every day from starvation or disease.  He does mention that anyone sent off to the hospital, like the Narrator’s grandmother and sister, were not expected ever to return.               

In 1944 conditions in the camp became even worse under the new Commandant Kenichi Sonei, a sadist who was later tried and executed for war crimes.  He instituted twice daily roll-calls where all the internees, even the sick, had to attend and be searched.  At his will they would be required to stand for hours in the in the assembly square.  The Narrator relates that the commandant would require everyone to jump up and down like frogs and if they began to waver they would be savagely beaten.  The Narrator’s feet were burned on the hot asphalt and blistered from the jumping.  The Narrator may give himself pedicures when he is older, but they hardly compensate for the psychological damage that was done.  He says he has become as calloused as his feet had been.

Worst for the Narrator was the day when the Japanese learned the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima.  The commandant determined that all the prisoners would be executed and the camp destroyed.  Before the horrific killings could be completed, the Narrator’s mother saw the Red Cross trucks arriving and her elated announcement of the fact to the others caused the commandant to beat her until she bled.  The Narrator could not move.  As he says: “À partir de ce moment-là, je suis égaré. Mon dégoût de la vie et mon désir de ne pas être présent. À partir de ce moment-là, je sais que dorénavant, désormais, je préférerais toujours être seul et ne pas devoir m’attacher à quelqu’un ou à quelque chose, car je ne veux pas voir mon amour et la beauté que je chéris être ravagés ou abîmés. À ce moment-là, je pensais : maintenant je veux une autre mère, celle-ci est cassée ...”.  (“From that moment on I am disoriented.  My disgust for life and my desire not to be present.  From that moment on, I know that from then on, no matter what, I would prefer to be alone and not to attach myself to anyone or anything, since I do not want to see my love and the beauty that I cherish ravaged or destroyed.  From that moment on I thought: now I want another mother, this one is broken”.) 

We know that soldiers and service dogs returned from war can suffer post-traumatic stress syndrome.  A modern analysis of Brouwers’ story would conclude that that is what the Narrator suffered as a child.  Indeed, he mentions that he was sent away to be schooled at a convent because he was found to be too difficult in public school when he finally returned to Europe. 

The play, however, is not about a medical condition but an existential one.  The phrase that haunts him is the pragmatist’s view that nothing exists independently.  Things exist only in relationship, or as he keeps saying, “Nulle chose n’existe qui n’en touche une autre” (“Nothing exists that does not touch something else”).  Having seen the depths of evil at such a young age the Narrator finds he is dissociated from everything around him.  Yet, it is clear that present situations trigger past memories and his past experiences continue to influence the present.  His present pain has become proof of his existence and confirms the phrase.  Thus, the Narrator continues to live but the point of living eludes him.  Only in the continual movement and impermanence of the wind does he seem to find any peace.    

In the play the Narrator says that when he learned of his mother’s death he looked at the window and saw someone just like himself looking back at him.  Director Guy Cassiers expands this image of dissociation from the self to all aspects of the production.  In Peter Missotten’s completely deconstructed set, the middle-aged Narrator’s home is represented by a window of glass louvers suspended in mid-air downstage left.  Upstage right is a proscenium-high arrangement of broad-bladed venetian blinds that look as if they are made of bamboo.  This represent the camp in Jakarta.  Cassiers has used five live video cameras to project images of the Narrator onto the glass louvers so that we see the actor through his own image. On the bamboo louvers we see the actor’s shadow superimposed on his own projected image.  Near the climax of the play we see five avatars of the actor layered as image-shadow-image-shadow-image-shadow against the bamboo screen.  When either the glass or bamboo blinds open with the actor’s image projected onto it we get a brilliant portrayal of the Narrator’s self-image literally vanishing into nothing. 

Actor Dirk Roofthooft performs his role using a microphone.  In the theatre this does not work to bring the actor closer to us but to distance him.  We see his lips move but he speaks at a conversational, sometimes sub-conversational, level so that the amplified voice is out of proportion with its real spoken sound level.  Through the non-naturalistic stage set and the use of projections and amplification, Cassiers highlights the imagery of Brouwers’ tale while simultaneously distancing us from it.  He thus places us in the same situation as the Narrator who is both affected by his past but alienated from it. 

Roofthooft gives an extraordinary performance veering between the middle-aged Narrator’s present anomie to the Narrator’s re-experiencing the horrors of the concentration camp.  Like many fine European actors he has mastered the Brechtian art of “demonstrating” a role rather than becoming the character in a naturalistic style which fits perfectly with Cassiers’ overall approach.

As one might gather, the play is unrelievedly depressing.  Yet, we have seen so many portrayals of German concentration camps, we need to be reminded that Europeans were no the only people to descend into evil during World War II.  Indeed, the fact that horrors at Tjedeng match those at European camps should make obvious the discomfiting fact that the capacity for evil is latent in all humanity.  The play also explodes the popular notion that people can somehow put the past behind them and “move on” even if a child’s past contains atrocities it did not fully comprehend.  We carry the past with us.  Our task is to find a way to accommodate ourselves to it.  The play leaves us with unanswered questions that life forces us eventually to ask: “Nulle chose n’existe qui n’en touche une autre, mais que dois-je faire ? En quoi suis-je concerné? Que dois-je sentir?” (“Nothing exists that does not touch something else, but what should I do?  With what am I involved?  What should I feel?”).  Rouge décanté is a devastating experience, one that is so grounded in truth that it cannot be ignored.   

              

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Dirk Roofthooft in Rouge décanté. ©2009 Pan Sok.

For tickets, visit http://nac-cna.ca.