The infinite now
von Steven Heene
Erschienen in: Arbeitsbuch 2019: Luk Perceval (07/2019)
On 26 January 2013, “Platonov” opened in Ghent. The play, a well-known classic by Anton Chekhov, was hardly recognisable – at least, not at first sight. The stage was almost empty, apart from the nine actors and one piano player, Jens Thomas. In the radical adaptation by director Luk Perceval, the play, in which Chekhov presents a group of characters coming together in a mansion after the winter, was completely stripped down. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. This feeling of desolation was emphasised by a code between the players, all of whom were staring into the auditorium. This wasn’t an attempt to make contact with the audience, they were staring into the infinite, expressing their despair with an intensity that was, at times, hard to look at. Like Evelyne Coussens’ in her review in De Morgen said: “This is so bare, so essential, that it hurts the eyes.”
“Platonov”, performed at NTGent, the city theatre of Ghent, was the first production in a long time by Luk Perceval in Flanders, Belgium. He was still a house director at Thalia Theater, Hamburg, and had worked in Germany for many years – a chapter which more or less started with the...
