Forêts paisibles
Vaudeville mythologique

Martine Wijckaert is one of those rare sensitive ones who, out of personal singularity as much as political conviction, contrive to go beyond the boundaries of their artistic discipline by eroding them from the margins. Forêts paisibles (Peaceful Forests), her latest creation, is no exception.

The scenography warns, everything will be ambiguous. The walls are lined like at home with a motif suggesting a marshy biotope in the undergrowth. But a water fountain and a shower curtain on a rod suggest that at the same time we’re in a low-end apartment where an archaic, elementary impulse world will nevertheless be unleashed, that of a couple of satyrs flanked by their teenage offspring. Mediocre, vulgar and hairy with cloven hooves, the parents lament having produced an “abnormal” child: rebellious, hairless and in sneakers. Holed up in her “room” – a camping tent – ​​she broods over her resistance to thinking about her degenerate parents

In this ferocious fable, between vaudeville and mythology, the nuclear family is the empire broken taboos — from incest to murder — and of absolute hypocrisy. The jubilant bickering of Véronique Dumont, Alexandre Trocki and Héloïse Jadoul draws an infraworld between the daily life of Pan the satyr and that of the Deschiens. As rough in their relationships as they are refined in their language, father, mother and daughter make and break alliances, contemplating the most barbaric homicides and happily wallowing in their mire, for a caustic bacchanal with corrosive humour.

Production La Balsamine