Van den vos
Director: F.C. Bergman
Writer: Josse De Pauw
Based on: Reynard the Fox
Cast: Stef Aerts, Joé Agemans, Viviane De Muynck, Gregory Frateur, Bart Hollanders, Dirk Roofthooft, Thomas Verstraeten, Marie Vinck
Part of: Wiener Festwochen

[TRIGGER WARNING]

Plot:
Detective Isegrim Wolf is obsessed with finding Reynard Fox who raped and mutilated his wife and hurt his son. Wolf sends a couple of men after Fox, while he is visited by the apparition of a young girl – another victim of Fox. As things go on, Wolf loses himself more and more in a mix of horror from and admiration for Fox.

The original story about Reynard certainly isn’t a barrel of laughs but this play is pretty much atrocious. I was so close to walking out of the play several times but I was frozen in place from the horror of it.

[SPOILERS]

I have to admit that I didn’t re-familiarize myself with the original tale before this. If I had, maybe I would have been better prepared. But I still wouldn’t have been prepared for the fuckery of this play.

It started with the teenaged apparition (maybe it wasn’t an apparition, nobody knows) who in the beginning of the play floats in the pool in the center of the stage, dressed in nothing but a white nightgown, while it is made absolutely clear that she’s been the victim of a sexual crime and that she’s no older than 15 years. The rest of the play she spends appearing to the Wolf, lasciviously lying at the pool, masturbating, throwing herself at him. And it all ends with Wolf calling her a variety of slurs and almost raping her, but after a long monologue that made me want to throw up, he doesn’t. I mean, first of all, fuck you for sexualizing that girl. And second of all, I have no idea what the play wanted to tell me with this. That Wolf isn’t a good guy? No shit, Sherlock. The dude who sends other people to do his dirty work, who is upset not because his wife and kid suffered but because his property – wife and child – was fucking destroyed. That dude might not be a hero? Wow.
Or maybe he was supposed to be a hero in that scene because he was able “to withstand” the “temptation” that’s the teenage abuse survivor? Even if he can only do that after verbally abusing her? Well, slow fucking clap. Congrats on being an awful human being.

Honestly, that alone was enough to have me almost walk out several times. But there was also the gore that they thought necessary to include. And as a reader of my blog you probably know that I’m a fan of horror movies. I have a high gore-threshold. But I don’t need minutes of a dude literally chewing a woman’s face off while she screams incessantly. I don’t need a close-up while a man’s head is bashed in with a stone several times.

Those things completely disqualified the play for me, despite several nice things. Like the stage design that included a pool with actual water, a forest behind a glass wall and a lot of interesting video work. And despite Viviane De Muynck, who has an amazing presence on stage. And despite a stylized and beautiful version of how Fox is killed. It just wasn’t enough to redeem the play. In the end I was just happy to escape it.

Summarizing: fuck no.