Maison Maeterlinck / Theater Immobiel Thom Luz / NTGent

This is the starting point for the production Maison Maeterlinck / Theater Immobiel. In his first Belgian production, the Swiss theatre artist Thom Luz deals with the forgotten son of the city of Ghent, the mystical symbolist and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck - with his short plays about the tragedy of everyday life and his (posthuman) theory of The Immobile Theatre (or, in Maeterlinck's sense, the immobile World). From Maeterlinck's best-known one-act plays (Intruder / The Blind / Interior) Luz composes a new narrative about the sense and nonsense of life, humans and theatre - three perspectives on the same (mystical) story, a foray through Maeterlinck's ambiguous cosmos. Musical, absurd, poetic.

At the same time, the staging is a study of Maeterlinck's theory of Immobile Theatre - on this longing for a moment of stillness and silence that characterised his view of theatre and of the world. (read more after the video)

In Maeterlinck's plays, the human being is seen as one of many equal elements rather than the centre of attention. Maeterlinck even goes so far as to wonder whether it might be necessary to keep all living things completely off the stage, in order to truly grasp the truth: Won’t the human being everywhere in the world be replaced by a shadow, a reflection, a projection of symbolic forms or by a being that acts like a living one without being alive?

With his extraordinary theatrical language that links silence, movement, text, and music-dense, atmospheric spatial scores, Luz seeks a contemporary interpretation of this immobile theatre. How prophetic are Maeterlinck's reflections in the midst of a society in constant motion?

"Theatre could serve to reassure the overly confused of this world - and to confuse the overly reassured of this world.” With this quote by Robert Walser, Luz describes his own theatre cosmos - a magical space in which he breaks up classical patterns of perception, allows new images to appear, and "gives comfort by creating strange splendour”. An idea that would certainly appeal to Maeterlinck, who has been called the "lost father of the Theatre of the Absurd”. From tragic to magic - in keeping with NTGent's 22/23 season motto.