The starting point for Milo Rau’s newest production, Familie (which premiered at NTGent on January 4, 2020), is the strange case of the Demeester family. The four members of the family, René (55), Marie (55), and their two children Olivier (30) and Angélique (28), in late September 2007, hanged themselves in their family home in Calais in a still unexplained case of collective suicide. It is easy to understand why Rau and his team were drawn to the event, because, from outside (the only perspective available), it is utterly inexplicable: the family was close-knit and happy, with no notable financial trouble, or history of mental illness (other than a few bouts of depression). Nothing about them seems to indicate suicidal tendencies.
The only clue left by the family in this odd case of collective suicide, where no motive is visible, was an enigmatic, unsigned note that concludes:
“On a trop déconné. Pardon.”
[“We screwed up too much. Sorry.”]
Familie is – despite the depth of its subject-matter – a small production. It is concise, self-contained, and beautiful.
It looks at the demise of the close-knit and intensely private family from outside the walls of the now-absent familial unit. It is, in many ways, utterly unspectacular (a troupe found throughout Rau’s oeuvre). The death of the four people was neither loud nor gory. Even at the time it garnered relatively little media attention (and no international attention), and it was two days before the bodies were even found. The family was there and then they were simply gone.
The whole event was small, strange, and quiet.
However, the case raises a number of practical and existential questions: Why the family decided to kill themselves? Why they all did it together? How had they “screwed up”? And what did that last evening together look like? Over a decade later, these questions remain unanswered and the only people who could answer them now lie in a small grave about ten minutes away from the former home.
Familie, as should be obvious at this point, is a family drama. One that breaks apart – as so many plays have before it – the Western European middle-class familial unit and lays its existential struggles and questions bare for all to see.
The production’s hook (so to speak_ is that this family drama is played a real family: a mother, a father, and their two children. Namely, the Peeters-Miller clan, a family made up of Belgium’s brightest stars: in Familie, Filip Peeters and An Miller appear for the first time onstage with their teenage daughters, Louisa and Leonce. Using the Peeters-Miller family, Familie reconstructs the family’s (the Demeesters… or is it actually the Peeters-Millers?) final evening together, while exploring what could drive a family (and for that matter individuals) to suicide.
In contrast to Rau’s larger projects (staging a tribunal in the Congo, The Oresteia in Iraq, and the passion story in Southern Italy), Familie feels notably smaller, while using the familial lens to explore deeper existential themes.
Employing the collage-style autoethnography that Rau is known for, the Demeester’s story –shrouded in mystery – is brought to life by overlaying their family unit with that of the Peeters-Millers. The production uses the private lives of the Peeters-Millers – their lives and experiences – to parallel that of the Demeesters. The absolutely unique experiences of its performers as a family in today’s world serves to explore what it means to raise and grow up (and apart) as a family in a world on the brink of destruction.
The textual dramaturgy developed throughout facilitates a fascinating mixture of reality and fiction that clouds the boundaries between not only Peeters-Miller and Demeester, but also the experiences of the spectator. The evening – which if not for the suicide could be any evening – is meticulously reconstructed and Aptly, the concept of ethnography – the study of the customs, habits, rituals, and lives from within the specific society – runs through the production. An Miller even states that, before she became an actor, she considered studying ethnography.
Rau presents us with an ethnographic performance of the family unit. The family – either the Peeter-Millers or the Demeesters – is presented as a society, a sovereign nation unto itself. With each family possessing its own unique language and rituals, which mark its members’ victories, joys, disappointments, disillusionments, and fears. Familie examines what it means to raise a family in today’s world: the independence children long for combined with the intense loneliness that accompanies the increasing independence that comes with adolescence. We see children pulling away from their parents while simultaneously remaining intensely reliant on them, parents filled with fear for their children’s future as well as their own, and creeping regret for past actions and questioning of whether the right choice was made… lives not lived versus lives not yet lived.
Familie; Dir. Milo Rau; Photo credit: Michiel Devijver/NTGent
Familie is a play of existential doubt and ritualistic action.
The relatively short 100-minute performance has a fascinating dramaturgy. We are told in the opening moments of the performance how it will end: We know the family is going to hang themselves. Yet despite this inevitability, you hang on every word and action – even hoping that they may change their minds.
Even the actors themselves – who skillfully perform their roles with a compulsive energy, pulled with a sort of powerlessness towards their end as if by some unstoppable force – do not seem entirely sure of their decision. Still, they are utterly unwilling to abandon it.
Like an oft repeated ritual being witnessed for the first time but it is uncannily familiar. Although it is the last evening, nothing the family does – until they change into their Sunday best (designed by Louisa), hang the nooses, and step onto and then off the stools – is particularly out of the ordinary.
The evening beats on, slowly but steadily. It is all strikingly normal even banal and every day, it marches towards an inevitable conclusion (an ancient ritual that must be fulfilled): Filip cooks dinner (a very cool trick for the stage), An showers and calls her parents, Louisa helps Leonce study English, the family eats dinner together, watch old family movies, clean the house, and argue.
Over the course of the four acts – (1) Killing Time, (2) Family Dinner, (3) The Last Move, and (4) Final Preparations – each actor/family member is able to steps out of their Demeester performance (or are they just themselves?) to discuss their personal anxieties about raising children, starting a career, growing up, and growing apart. These elements come together to create a poetry for the mutual anxiety of our time. Parents question their decisions in the past, children wonder about uncertain futures, with everything steeped in that too familiar creeping existential dread.
A glass double of the Demeesters’ home in Calais (or is it the home of the Peeter-Millers?) sits center stage, complete with kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, dining room, and living room (garbage cans and lawn furniture outside). The set – brilliantly designed by Anton Lukas – is ingenious. It is closed and the audience is always outside what happens in the home (the sovereign nation of the family) and, therefore, much of what happens on the stage. Spectators can only access this action via the live film feed projected on the screen above the stage.
In short: We are always watching from outside, only ever really seeing what the camera shows us. Like nosey neighbours peering through a window, we watch from a distance. The set and staging serves as a constant reminder that we are not a part of this family and can, therefore, not be a part of their specific struggles: their shared fights, arguments, inside jokes, oft-repeated stories, memories, and history. The set highlight the voyeuristic quality that accompanies watching a family drama unfold, that accompanies watching someone else’s family as an intruder in their private space.
In Anna Karenina, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy famously quips: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Rau and his team present their audience with an in-depth exploration of the anxieties of the Western European family unit, which prove to be far more complex than Tolstoy suggests.
Familie, through its brilliant staging, acting, dramaturgy, and design, presents (both textually and visually) the dualities of within each and every family: the contradiction of the happy family portrait alongside the internal struggles of its members. The production looks at the existential struggles of people living and co-existing together, who simultaneously huddle together and push apart. It examines how those same small, personal, and even abstract aspects of a shared life and shared experience, those things that often seem so pointless and banal in the vastness of the world are (in the end) the very same things that make life so terrifying and so worth living.
Familie is a very different production than what you normally see and expect from Milo Rau – who, in recent years, has been named the enfant terrible of the European theatre. It is smaller, softer, steadier than what one expects entering the theatre to see a play about suicide.
In the end, as Louisa says at the very beginning, it leaves its audience without the answers they so desperately crave: Namely, why did the Demeesters commit suicide in 2007 and why are the Peeters-Millers, on this and every other evening? It offers its audience a hymn composed of collective love and despair, and the desperate loneliness that accompanies them. In its performative treatise on suicide – the impossible co-existence of presence and absence – Familie shines a light on our own mortality, fragility, and collective madness.
Lost Dramaturgin International 