On September 22, 2021, Milo Rau’s newest play, Grief and Beauty, premiered at NTGent’s Schouwburg. The play is an introspective examination of grief and its interconnected themes of remembering, forgetting, loss, love, pain, joy, and farewells. It looks what and how we grieve using the memories and experiences of its four onstage performers – Staf Smans, Anne Deylgat, Princess Isatu Hassan Bangura, and Arne de Tremerie – and the pre-recorded, digital ghost of Johanna B. At its core, a larger and more – on a purely human level – troubling existential question floats over the audience about human mortality: the inevitability of aging and bodily decay, the terrible and beautiful unpredictability of life, and our uncomfortable relationship with death and our inability to control it.
Grief and Beauty is the second installment in Rau’s Trilogy of Private Life, which opened in early 2020 with Family, and the natural successor to the director’s offering at the 2020 Salzburg Festespiele, Everywoman. The show premieres at a time inundated by grief, where we as a collective are drowning in a shared but simultaneously singular, isolating, and numbing sea of grief for the overwhelming loss from the past eighteen months. Yet Grief and Beauty never mentions the proverbial elephant in the room which kept the audience out of the theatre for over a year and which now limits the Schouwburg’s audience to a comically small portion of the massive house. Dramaturgically,the production illustrates the isolating quality of grief, showing the actors alone in their individual grief but also how they come together to share its weight. Although they never directly address the pain and loss of those with whom they share the stage, they understand it and monologically (i.e., through monologues) connect their pain to that of the others to form a temporary community of grief.
The play begins as Rau’s plays often do: With a full stage. Set designer Barbara Vandendriessche places a small, worn apartment bisected and opened to the audience like a doll’s house. Like any apartment that has been lived in for many years, it is filled with the artifacts of daily life, like a museum without sufficient storage: A vacuum sits in the bathroom, pictures and pieces of art conceal sections of the faded floral wallpaper, shelves cluttered with pictures, papers, and assorted knickknacks, boxes and an old sewing machine are piled against a kitchen wall, and a bed with a lifting pole and colourful quilt. The bed is pointed towards an old television – the screen facing away from the audience – that sits towards the front of the stage, meaning we can hear the television, but never see it. Projected on the screen above the stage – a classic Rau-ism – is an elegant elderly woman with short white curled hair, an orange sweater, black square wire glasses, and a white necklace. She stares out at the audience with a neutral expression – not quite a smile but certainly not a frown – as the other four actors and Clémence Clarysse, the production’s cello player, wander onto and about the stage. In another classic Rau-ism, the oldest actor of the group, Staf, strips off his suit – revealing a thin, aged body and a catheter strapped to his leg – and, with the help of Arne, is showered, dressed loose-fitting pajamas, and led to the bed.
As the prologue begins, Princess introduces us to Johanna B., the older woman whose image we see projected above the stage. The actors met with Johanna several times before she died on August 28, 2021. Johanna suffered from a chronic illness and decided she wanted euthanasia. It was a way to retake control of her life by choosing how it would it end. She agreed to take part in the production because, in her own words: “Death is such lonely work and it is pushed out of a society instead of making it shareable so we can talk about it in a realistic and open way.”
The production engages in a frank discussion of death, both theatrically and in the real world. After Johanna’s introduction, Arne – a young, professional actor from Ghent – recalls his first role, when as a child he played the titular year in a local production of The Little Prince. He recalls the production’s final scene, where The Little Prince is bitten by The Snake to return home to his planet and beloved Rose. He reenacts the Little Prince’s death as he performed it as a child: Back turned to the stage, Arne’s body tenses as he extends his arms out and up, standing on his toes before collapsing to the floor. Here again, we find that classic Rau mechanism of connecting the theatrical to the real, finding a theatrical text (in this case an adaptation) that connects one of the central themes of the production (in this case death, dying, and euthanasia).
Grief and Beauty, like Familie, is split into three title-less chapters. Each chapter is marked by a video of or with Johanna and a narration from Princess about Johanna. Chapter One features Johanna sitting and staring at the camera, Chapter Two the actors having coffee with Johanna in her home, and Chapter Three Johanna’s deathbed shot from a camera left hanging above the bed. Between these quiet moments with Johanna, we learn more about Staf, Anne, Princess, and Arne: about their families, loves, and losses. They are united by grief, not just grief for the dead, but grief for lost youth, for broken families, for sick family members, for homes left behind and never revisited, for the big loves that simply fell out, for forgotten memories, and for all those things irrevocably and irreplaceably lost.
Anne recalls how after her last relationship dissolved, she suffered from insomnia and how, when she can’t sleep, listens to a live stream from a wolf reserve in the USA. She finds peace in the wolves’ lonesome howling and explains that their seemingly forlorn cries are actually the wolves communicating, calling out to each other.
Then the four actors howl, connecting to each other in the darkened theatre.
Memory is always a central theme in Rau’s work. Grief and Beauty builds on the autobiographical memories of its actors to construct a narrative, but it also grapples with the pain that accompanies lost memories and that second , new shot of pain and grief that accompanies the realization that the memory of a loved one, a cherished moment, or even something small but significant has faded into obscurity… how this loss can feel like losing that person all over again.
Chapter Three: A Brief Discussion of Johanna B.
Chapter Three is significant because it features the death of Johanna. Prior to her death, the actors recall their own experiences with death: the death of a child or the death of a parent. The production team rigged a camera to hang above Johanna’s bed to capture her final moments without intrusively having the production team in the space. She lies there, surrounded by friends and family.
It is strange to say, but it is a small unspectacular death. She lies comfortably in bed, her sons and those she loves hold her hands, touch her face, and accompany her in these final moments. The death is small and ordinary and yet there is something poetic in her final words. She expresses that she always wanted to go with a smile and that it just feels like she’s going to sleep. She then says, “It’s nice. There’s nothing bad… there’s nothing…” Just like that she’s gone. Disappeared into the great unknown leaving only a body with the remnants of the serine smile that graced her face in those final moments.
For all the talk of the numbing effect that the past eighteen months, Grief and Beauty shows us just how raw this theme of death and dying still is and how impactful the loss of a single life – even a relative stranger – can be.
There is, of course, an ethical question attached to Johanna’s final appearance. It feels intrusive to place a camera above a deathbed. It feels like a disruption of this deeply private moment. On the other hand, the scene demystifies and destigmatizes the theme of death and euthanasia. It forces the audience to look at death… to witness it firsthand.
In the end, the question is: Is this visit to the deathbed of Johanna intrusive, artistic, meaningful? Does it show us something new and important? Does it add to an ongoing conversation? Does it demystify the horror we feel surrounding death and our own terrible mortality? Or is it simply a provocative spectacle to shock the audience and make a splash with the critics? In truth, I’m not sure. It probably sits uncomfortably among these things. Or – more likely – it is simultaneously all these things.
Concluding Thoughts
Grief and Beauty is smaller, less philosophical than Everywoman and many of Rau’s recent productions. Do not come to Grief and Beauty in search of answers, because the production offers none, nor does it offer comfort. Like Family, it does not attempt to find reason or deeper meaning to loss. This loss simply is. It is left on the stage for the audience to grapple with.
Instead, Grief and Beauty embraces the smallness and everyday-ness of death: showing it can be both terrible and beautiful. It shows how life extends far beyond its end, resonating outwards like ripples from a stone thrown into the ocean and thus makes a satisfactory and all-encompassing epitaph for even single person impossible. Grief, the production explains, is located in the strange half-forgotten memories of those things – people, places, things, relationships – lost in the fog of the past. The grief is not only for the person, the relationship, or the place but also for the part of ourselves that existed with that person and disappears along with them.
Is death and loss like a black hole (a motif introduced in the production’s final moments), an endless void that swallows everything in its path? The apartment and screen fly up and out of sight – finally the stage matches the empty feelings that accompany loss and grief – and a swirling mass of fog around a bright light – a black hole – appears above the stage. The truth is, Arne explains, no one really knows what is on the other side of a black hole… just as no one knows what is on the other side of life. A picture of a black hole – like picture of death – is a picture of both nothing and everything. To paraphrase Arne, it is an archive of an entire human life in its most basic form.
Grief is about love – the extension of love beyond the corporeal, the physical, the present.
Grief comes from the impossibility of return, glancing backwards while being always, painfully aware of how unobtainable, just out of reach, this yesterday is.
Yet the production is not only sad and sorrowful but tinged with moments of joy and happy memories. It ends on a joyous note: Staf’s memory of how he met his wife of fifty years as a young soldier at free dance lessons. These happy and joyous moments of remembering give the production a melancholy quality that stays with you in the hours after the final applause. As is often the case with Rau and NTGent productions, the autobiographical rememberings of the actors connect with its spectators on a human level.
Pain finds pain and love finds love, and in that we all become part of a pack of wolves howling into the dark theatre to find each other in both our fresh and latent grief.
And isn’t that beautiful.
Lost Dramaturgin International 