Film
DIRECTION: Milo Rau
DRAMATURGY & RESEARCH: Carmen Hornbostel
CAST: An Miller, Filip Peeters, Leonce Peeters, Louisa Peeters
ASSISTANCE DRAMATURGY: Eline Banken
COACH: Peter Seynaeve
LIGHT DESIGN: Dennis Diels
SET & COSTUME DESIGN: Anton Lukas, Louisa Peeters
MUSICAL ARRANGEMENT: Saskia Venegas Aernouts
PRODUCTION: NTGent
COPRODUCTION: Romaeuropa Festival, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt), Théâtre de Liège, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Scène Nationale d’Albi
WITH SUPPORT OF: Tax Shelter maatregel van de Belgische Federale Overheid
PREMIERE: 2021
DURATION: 1h 30 min.
DATES: 1, October | 16:00
VENUE: Art printing house
LANGUAGE: English
In 2007 in Calais, a whole family hanged themselves: the parents and their two children. Never a motive was found, the suicide note stated: “We messed up, sorry.”
What reasons, what traumas underlie such a suicide? In Family, the first part of Milo Rau’s Trilogy of Private Life, we see a real family on stage: actors An Miller and Filip Peeters do not only act together as a couple, but for the first time in their career they are on stage with their two teenage daughters Leonce and Louisa – and their dogs.
Family is an experiment, an ethnological study of today’s private life, an exhibition of the everyday: on stage we see the house of the family Demeester – or is it the house of the family Peeters/Miller? Together they reconstruct the mysterious case of the family Demesteer, following the journey of their own family, questioning the construction of family as the cell of life and origin of our world today.
Fiction and reality mix, as we see on stage an evening like many in families – only that it is the last one. We watch a family while they eat, shower, learn English, watch videos. We see them talking about everyday things, making phone calls, listening to music, cleaning up the apartment, remembering moments of their lives. And in this exhibition of the normal, the big questions arise: Why are we here? Why am I here? And wouldn’t it be better if we would disappear?
