An especially unwell author enters the hospital. Realizing that this might be his final keep, he holds a pocket book, telling his household that he was engaged on his final article.
When his son opens the pocket book after the author’s loss of life, nonetheless, all he finds are illegible scratches and a mysterious title: “The useless don’t eat yogurt.”
When the son on this story is the well-known director and playwright Thiago Rodriguez, there’s a nice probability that the pocket book will nonetheless grow to be an artwork. His father, Portuguese journalist Rogerio Rodriguez, apparently additionally knew him. In “no yogurt for the useless”, which premiered Thursday on the Belgian gaming home earlier than a European tour, he tells his son: “Nobody may ever let you know one thing fascinating about one thing in any respect with out doing one in every of your performs. “
Rodriguez, who has been the director of the Avignon Pageant in France since 2022, has the power to show intimate tales right into a stirring theater. Certainly one of his longest productions, “By heart”(2013), pays tribute to his grandmother by educating the members of the viewers a poem; Lately, he has additionally explored the battle for the actual lifetime of others, as with the humanitarian employees of. “As far as impossibleS “
“No yogurt for the useless” is the sixth installment within the NTGent Theater sequence, which was launched in 2018 by Milo Row, then directed by The Playhouse. Rodriguez’s recreation bends a lot additional than he normally does his job, however nonetheless feels someway ambivalent in phrases. In a short introduction, with the nonetheless lights of the home, the Belgian actress Lisa Adea, who performs a nurse, explains that “the author of this play” – as she issues Rodriguez – selected to “think about” what the final one may be His father’s father’s article could also be his father’s remaining article to his father – as they have been involved.
The result’s a blurring of actuality and fiction, she provides, earlier than handing again faux beards to 2 different performers, Manuela Azevedo and Beatrice Brace, each from Portugal, who play variations of Rodrigs and his father. For the remainder of the play, which unfolds in a mixture of Portuguese and Flemish, they’re known as brief flour and lengthy bond, occupying “with out yogurt for the useless” of folklore shine.
It’s a sharpened fraud to place a long way between Rodriguez and the non-public occasions he explores. Azevedo and Brás proceed to alternate roles by carrying exaggerated beards to carry out varied absorptions on Rogério’s – or Longbeard’s – Last Days. His loss of life, indicated each time by sudden outbursts of stage smoke, is commonly performed for a comedy impact. (Enjoyable, on the NTGent web site, a set off warning states: “In a number of scenes one dies theatrical.”)
However this method additionally emphasizes the stress that the sport by no means decides. On the coronary heart of “no yogurt for the useless” is a robust connection. The couple bumps many instances over the small issues, and at one level the daddy says that the brief “was not very son”. Rodriguez stops deepening within the ache behind such exchanges.
On this sense, “no yogurt for the useless” is a very totally different proposal from “Vidi Muavad” to “Mother“One other latest research of a parent-child dynamics from a playwright and a high-profile director. Muavad, the director of The Théâtre de la Colline in Paris, laid the painful feelings, uncovered to this work for the lifetime of his mom, during which he himself additionally appeared. Rodriguez, alternatively, workout routines such restraints that it’s troublesome to even decipher the emotions of a brief twice to his father.
“The main target stays on Rorgeo, an anti -fascist activist in Portugal, who was pressured to stay in exile in France. A part of his work as a journalist is embodied within the textual content and on stage he encounters demanding – he beats his son that he forgot to carry him a black pen – but loyal and loving. When Rodriguez’s mom seems in a ghost type and sings Jacques Brell’s track to him, the deep connection between them is transmitted superbly.
The music is slowly outpacing manufacturing from that second on. Azevedo and Brás are very good singers they usually be part of the stage by Hélder Gonçalves, a Portuguese composer and musician who appeared in Rodrigues’ Cherry Orchard in Avignon. Right here, Gonçalves supplies a melancholic background of a hospital guitar landed on Sammy Van Den Den Heuvel, a most group that resemble layers of cracked floor.
The connection between Rodriguez’s music and father was hinted at the start: Longbeard Hums Songs in his hospital mattress and tells his son that they’ve come from a mysterious Teresa. A quick brum believes his father’s reminiscence fails him. Within the final 10 minutes, nonetheless, a coup of a theater within the type of a brand new character has revealed the supply of music.
It connects manufacturing along with a dramaturgical craft of Rodriguez on a full show. And once more, his stand-on the scene-at that second a grieving son is sort of somewhat. On behalf of his father, the brand new character makes a short break promise to not use what he simply realized in a play. “I promise,” says the brief Bond, including, after pause, “For my father’s well being.”
On the opening of the evening, the alternate registered as a comedy. Trying instantly on the viewers, the actress who performs the position of a tumultuous one recommended that Rodriguez wouldn’t retain her phrase. Was it troublesome? What does it imply for a author to make the most of his father’s personal phrases and historical past? Possibly Rodriguez will inform us for some day: “No yogurt for the useless” might go away you to need one.
No yogurt for the useless – Historical past (s) of Theater VI
Till January 31 at NTGent in Ghent, Belgium; ntghent.beS Further dates in Portugal (Lisbon and Braga) in February and Austria (Vienna) in Might and June.
