Coping with the guilt we all carry realised on stage
Flemish theatre collective’s meditation on life, death, innocence and guilt is also a confrontation between two conflicting cultures
Innocence lost
But no matter how much we might want to, no one can stay innocent forever, and we carry our guilt with us. The weight of it can be felt throughout Loher’s mosaic story, which is being staged by Antwerp theatre collective De Roovers.
Fadoul is the other immigrant, a man trying to make the best of his new life in an unspecified seaside town, where a variety of characters deal with their pasts, full of big and small regrets, blaming and self-reproach.
“I immediately knew I wanted the role of Fadoul,” says 38-year-old Congolese actor Jovial Mbenga, one of the seven guest actors in the play. “It was a lot of fun, but there was also a lot of text – a real challenge for my Dutch. But more importantly, I could identify with the ambiguous emotions the text evokes.”
An ideal intermediary
Mbenga was a member of the successful Congolese theatre company les Bejarts. He came to Belgium seven years ago, at first to collaborate with Brussels’ KVS theatre. Later, he also appeared in the play Het vertrek van De Mier (Leaving De Mier) by Toneelhuis director Guy Cassiers and launched the autobiographical monologue Mon Noord.
In Onschuld he appears to be the ideal intermediary to give a Western audience a different perspective on life (and death).
Sitting at the back of the theatre, it feels like they are pointing at you, these two undocumented immigrants, but they are standing on a beach. Looking at the horizon, they are pointing at the spot where they saw a woman going into the sea, but not coming back. “This event, clearly a suicide, will change everything for Fadoul,” Mbenga says.
A migrant’s conscience is constantly balanced between normal human impulses and second thoughts
“He wants to rescue her, but he can’t swim,” he continues. “And what if he gets himself into trouble when talking about what he just saw? All undocumented people have these kind of issues. Their conscience is constantly balanced between their normal human impulses and second thoughts, created by the vulnerable situation they are in.”
When Fadoul later finds a bag containing money, he considers it a gift from God and tries to buy off his guilt, but it’s harder than he had expected. Fadoul came to Europe to find a better life, but instead he becomes a mess struggling with feelings previously unknown to him.
On stage, he is one of 10 characters dealing with a loss of innocence. All of them have different coping mechanisms, making Onschuld a perfect illustration of how Loher smartly evokes evolutions in society by focusing on the individuals living in it.
Confrontation
Humour makes this criticism of Western meritocracy easier to digest. For instance, there’s the recurring sarcasm and self-pity of the diabetic Mevrouw Suiker (Ms Sugar), looking back at her banal life from her wheelchair.
And this staging by De Roovers benefits from Stef Stessel’s scenography, the scenes stylised and frozen as if it were a picture in a frame.
Ultimately, Mbenga, who describes himself as an eternal optimist, proposes another way to tackle these difficult issues. “I was born in Kinshasa. People don’t complain about their problems there. Like death, they are part of life,” he says. “So for Africans, it is really strange to see how people take their own lives in the Western world, making a meeting or confrontation between the two cultures all the more relevant.”
Until 19 May, across Flanders
Photo: Stef Stessel
