Mystiek lichaam

Fiercely conservative and obsessed with money and purity, Gijselhart stands directly opposed to his own children. Daughter Magda (nicknamed Prul) is pregnant out of wedlock by a Jewish man, and son Leendert returns from New York as an AIDS patient. Old wounds are torn open again. And when the father of Prul's baby also enters the scene, a confrontation becomes unavoidable.

A family on edge

Forty years after the publication of Frans Kellendonk's controversial novel, director Koen Verheijden brings the story back to the stage. In his distinctive, layered language, Kellendonk captured a year in the life of the broken Gijselhart family. A family that grows into a striking mirror of the polarised Dutch society at the end of the twentieth century. And forty years later, that image is still strikingly recognisable.

The Gijselhart family wants nothing more than to belong together, but the harder they try, the further apart they drift. Because as we watch this family derail, one question inevitably arises: do we really think we, as a society, are doing any better than in Kellendonk's time?

Verheijden chooses a grotesque, at times raw and comic style of performance in which humour and discomfort exist side by side. Not to judge, but to make visible how people can lose each other, precisely when they try to hold on.