They are in the corner of the stage, the four theater stars. They greet the incoming audience in a friendly and curious way, as if we were old friends. It's a disarming image, how they stand there, slightly bent over, tense but eager to begin. As if they never lost the feeling of their very first theater performance, the adrenaline, the nerves, the feeling that everything is at stake.
Four years ago, choreographer Nicole Beutler and author Magne van den Berg made Love Declaration, a mirror image adaptation of Peter Handke's Publikumsbeschimp-fung. Where in the original from 1966 the audience was fired at all kinds of accusations, reproaches and curses for a long period of time, the young actors paid tribute to the audience in Declaration of Love. The power of the performance lay in the youthful open-mindedness of the actors and the clever text, which indirectly praised the fleeting beauty of the theatre, that strange place between reality and fiction where reality, which is always nagging for attention, briefly becomes collective. suspended.
The latter is also central to the spiritual successor Declaration of Love (forever). The big difference with the earlier performance, however, is that there are no adolescents on stage here, but seasoned veterans, all four of whom have been active in the theater for decades. The text is written in the past tense ('you wanted to be touched / you wanted to listen / and we mercilessly held up mirrors to you'), which gives the whole a melancholic tone: here we do not look to the future with young eyes. but looking back on a rich and eventful theater past.
Another stark contrast to the original is that the actors remain strong individuals. It cannot be otherwise with such unique performers as Marien Jongewaard, René van 't Hof, Cas Enklaar and Maureen Teeuwen: their completely individual playing style creates an interesting tension compared to a text composed as a joint monologue. The comical, almost clownish silent playing of Van 't Hof, the supported repertory style of Enklaar, the angular directness of Teeuwen, the punk anarchism of Jongewaard - they always bubble up between the seams of the tight basic structure.
The stubbornness of the actors leads to some of the most beautiful scenes. Slowly, reproaches towards the audience creep into the text. 'You didn't look/ you looked away', says Jongewaard, and, Van 't Hof must say, 'that hurt'. That pain, the fear of rejection or obscurity that haunts every artist throughout his life, is the dark side of the eternal gratitude that is (forever) showered on the public in Declaration of Love; the unequal relationship between artist and public perhaps makes true disinterestedness impossible.
And yet – there is also beauty in that interdependence. In one of the closing scenes, the fragility of the pact between players and spectators is emphasized: how we all make it possible together, 'you there, and we here'. The realization that theater is above all a vulnerable attempt at an encounter, makes this declaration of love clear.