De Pauw (Engels) - depot voor het VTi

josse de pauw
I walk, hobble, stagger, limp, drag myself to the door.
Outside the rain thrashes my skin.
He hangs stretched out in the twisted top of an olive tree.
The wind shakes, thrashes, knocks, lashes, whips, bludgeons
the tree fiercely.
The water beats in tankfuls against his bare body.
He smirks, giggles, cheers, whoops, roars, snorts, crows,
bellows out above the storm.
He has gone mad.
I take the tree next to his.
The workings of the linguistic technique are exposed by means
of comical associations and word games. The language then
appears to be something quasi-autonomous that is confronted by
the authors during the process of growth. The course of the writing
process is quite intuitive; the reality grows almost organically
out of the words. The hand of the play-maker also makes its
presence felt, however: a great deal of importance is attached to
the richness of the sound of what is written, to the musicality it
produces, and to its expressiveness when the text is spoken
aloud. The abundant use of ellipses and short, dry sentences
which are aloof and put things in perspective, does not detract
from the fact that even on stage, De Pauw’s language is very
involved, warm and evocative.
In De Pauw’s writing, poetry is more than a stylistic quality.
Ward Comblez and Het Kind van de Smid are not in the first
instance about what the characters think and feel, at least not
explicitly, but focus on sensory perception. The characters’ inner,
emotional world is reflected through this experienced description
of the outside world. In Het Kind van de Smid, for example,
Pomp describes his own birth, as if he had stood watching it as
an uninvolved spectator:
She had gone into the forest alone that day.
When the tendrils of mist wrapped themselves round the bushes,
she was squatting down in the undergrowth.
She had spread out the blanket and bitten the rattlesnake’s
rings to pieces.
Labour started soon after.
Then the Smith appeared out of the thicket.
Shocked, helpless, foolish. Each contraction drew him closer.
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artistic development: de pauw’s way and weg
She took hold of his arm and pressed.
After a short while the child broke out of her body.
Pomp, she said. First born.
The basic theme from which the Ward Comblez monologue
unfolds is simple: Ward Comblez is waiting, waiting hopelessly
for the beloved whom he now has to miss. To ease his sorrow, he
(re)experiences his long journeys in his mind. Miscellaneous
descriptions of snapshots in Algeria, Curaçao and Crete are
linked together by recollections of what is past: the conversations
he had with his wife, the poem by T.S. Eliot that he found so
‘lovely’. It is tempting to read Ward Comblez as an extension of
and sequel to Usurpation. In this piece, the duel between the man
and woman has come to an end, and loneliness is at its heart. ‘In
the past I wrote about the trouble of being together, and this
piece is about the trouble of being alone’ 11 , says De Pauw.
Ward Comblez was created in 1989 on commission to
Kaaitheater. The performances underwent several interesting
changes of text and set design and ran on into spring 1990. The
music for the performance was once more by Peter Vermeersch,
and Franky Deconinck was responsible for the set installation.
Peter Van Kraaij read and corrected the writing and guided the
process of performing the script in the way a coach would. In this
respect, Josse De Pauw refers to Ezra Pound’s position as the first
reader of T.S. Eliot’s work, from whose poem The Waste Land he
quotes several extracts in this monologue.
‘A man’s waiting has something feminine about it.’ This was
the motto accompanying Ward Comblez, inspired by Roland
Barthes’ book Fragments d’un Discours Amoureux. The French
philosopher writes on the fact that the woman is traditionally
given the role of the one who waits: she is sedentary, while the
man always takes off. He writes: ‘Ils’ensuit que dans tout homme
qui parle l’absence de l’autre, du féminin se déclare: cet homme
qui attend et qui souffre est miraculeusement féminisé’. 12 Ward
Comblez awaits his beloved. Whether she has gone forever
remains uncertain. So the play is a sort of labour of sorrow.
When someone leaves, you accuse them of infidelity, according to
Barthes, because you are the one who is left behind. In order to
be able to continue your life you want to forget your beloved and
your shared life as soon as possible. But you forget that forgetting
is in its turn a form of infidelity. To escape from the barren
27 / Kritisch Theater Lexicon - 14 e - August 2001
Ward Comblez.
He do the life in
different voices