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Review Theatre

A faithful performance by a Nobel Prize winner: you have to go there, because you don’t see it much anymore. Tg Stan and Discordia stage the melancholic Warm. There is no shortage of sophisticated skills and accuracy, but there is a breath of fresh air.

Warm from Tg Stan

When writer Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize last year, TG Stan actor Damiaan De Schrijver was over the moon. He has already edited a text by his hero four times together with his Amsterdam comrades from Discordia. In Warm, two men (in addition to De Schrijver, also Matthias de Koning) meet on a pier in the sea. Are they friends? Enemies? Have they ever met? Where and when exactly? And who was that woman in a black swimsuit (Annette Kouwenhoven)? The characters float above time — sailing past the past in an attempt to grasp the here and now.

A bank card, a crumpled pack of cigarettes, a mobile phone charger: the two men empty their pockets on the table and start. They are undefined, empty. “Where are we? Here? Anyway, here we are. We can’t always be here, can we?” Fosse’s text, here in translation by Maaike van Rijn, is a score in which every ‘yes’ or ‘no’, every repetition, every silence counts. De Schrijver calls the language clear and powerful like the Norwegian fjord air, but it is certainly also cloudy and elliptical.

The sober three-way conversation Warm sounds like a mathematical stalemate: very simple terms, but the true meaning remains obscure. Acting here is a technical meditation, an exercise in eloquence. And that is certainly De Schrijver’s playground; despite the challenging writing, he jokes with the audience.

Old fashioned

The woman stirs up old feelings of jealousy in the duo. They are bogged down in an aporia, but what exactly do we see? A love triangle? Dementia sufferers with separation anxiety? Doppelgangers? Or is it about a split self, about how you never coincide with yourself? There is no answer. In any case, the cigar smell on stage has lifted from a mist of melancholy. Anyone who wants to grab the ‘now’ takes you by surprise, feeling that it is already mercilessly over the moment you say it.

Warm is a gem, but one from the antique dealer. Not only the tenor, but also the dull design — brown canvases, low-hanging light bulbs, two doors on trestles — seems somewhat stale. De Schrijver, de Koning and Kouwenhoven excel at what they do: metaphysical musings about supposed relationships on a long-ago summer afternoon. But maybe that kind of nostalgic musing about “her hard nipples like red buds” or the “incision in her white thighs” is too corny to really freak you out.

You wonder whether De Schrijver and his two cronies could also take a different, less trodden path with Fosse. Because there is no shortage of passion and genius.