It has invented a wild eloquence for its characters, who speak of terror in childlike accents. Its staging and its vocabulary are all of one unsettling piece. A wooden timber-frame topped with a weathercock serves as the outline of a backwoods cabin in which three brothers and their sister are orphaned when a bolt of lightning strikes. Later, wheeled across the stage, this very unstable home becomes a cage. They guard her, they display her, and they abuse her.
Care can be a prison, the play suggests.
A Dutch company is responsible for the most surprising theatrical coup of the Festival. Under the direction of Johan Simons, Jeroen Willems's one-man show is an intricate and scalding denunciation of the free market. The text of Voices is taken from statements by Pier Paolo Pasolini and the chairman of Shell International. Its manner shifts startlingly. Five bigwigs are portrayed with an intense realism which could be rivalled only by Johns Fortune and Bird.