Thirteen years ago, a man and a woman — ‘he’ and ‘she’ — had to apologise. They wanted to tell you something about Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, but just as the protagonist of that novel never manages to tell his love story because he keeps getting lost in side plots and digressions, the man and the woman failed to unravel Diderot’s text for you. Their own relationship, whatever its nature, took over. They could not — or would not — put into words what was going on between them, afraid that naming it would break it. So they kept talking, precisely to avoid talking about it. And in doing so, they risked losing each other.
In 2012, the newly founded theatre collective Hof van Eede won the TAZ-KBC Young Theatre Award with its very first production: Where the world is heading, that’s where we are heading too, performed by Ans Van den Eede and Greg Timmermans. Thirteen years later, they return with DE HOE to the source of all the love stories they have lived on stage since. How do the texts from back then resonate with their lives now? And are they even still able to perform them?
In their mercurial homage to the art of conversation, Ans and Greg look back on their former ideas of love, secretly longing for their lost naivety. A reworking that is also a blocked attempt to return to who they once were.
