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The Hothouse HAROLD PINTER

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CRÉATION The Hothouse HAROLD PINTER 20 21 GRAND THÉÂTRE › STUDIO 2 CRÉATION The Hothouse HAROLD PINTER WEDNESDAY 24, THURSDAY 25, FRIDAY 26, TUESDAY 30 & WEDNESDAY 31 MARCH & THURSDAY 1 & FRIDAY 2, TUESDAY 6, WEDNESDAY 7, FRIDAY 9 & SATURDAY 10 APRIL 2021 › 8PM WEDNESDAY 7 & SATURDAY 10 APRIL 2021 › 3PM SUNDAY 11 APRIL 2021 › 5PM – Running time 2h00 (no interval) – Introduction to the play by Janine Goedert 30 minutes before every performance (EN). – This performance contains stroboscopic lights. 3 GRAND THÉÂTRE › STUDIO 4 With Tubb Pol Belardi Lamb Danny Boland Miss Cutts Céline Camara Lobb Catherine Janke Lush Marie Jung Roote Dennis Kozeluh Gibbs Daron Yates & Georges Maikel (dance) – Directed by Anne Simon Set design Anouk Schiltz Costume design Virginia Ferreira Music & sound design Pol Belardi Lighting design Marc Thein Assistant director Sally Merres Make-up Joël Seiller – Wardrobe Manuela Giacometti Props Marko Mladjenovic – Production Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg 5 GRAND THÉÂTRE › STUDIO THE HOTHOUSE The Hothouse is a play about unchecked (state)-power and the decisions leaders make – spurious decisions that are potentially dangerous in the name for the preservation of a society. Somewhere in an authoritarian state. Former military Colonel Roote runs an institution where bureaucracy rules and the inmates are reduced to numbers. When one Christmas day, the cantankerous Colonel is confronted by a double crisis with the death of one inmate and the pregnancy of another, he finds himself increasingly cornered and sees the system he obeys so respectfully slip away. The Hothouse is a blackly comic portrait of the insidious corruption of power and demonstrates how far people will go to keep a system alive that is long condemned to fail. After all it’s the only one they have. Anne Simon and her international ensemble embark the audience into a dark, absurdist microcosm that its inhabitants desperately try to keep in existence because it is their sole raison d’être. Anouk Schiltz’ 360°set, reminiscent of a panopticon prison, plunges the spectator right at the heart of this dangerous game of appearances and slipping realities. 6 DIRECTOR’S NOTE The Claim-Game What else is a society other than “a group of people in which group common assumptions are shared and common principles observed?” That is true for any kind of society: we agree to agree on certain principles and truths, whether they be factually true or not doesn’t matter, what matters is that we BELIEVE in the same truths. This mechanism is one on which societies are built. It is how we define who our enemies are – namely those who do not play by those rules and act by the same beliefs. It is the contracts that we make with each other. Most truths are, as humanity has to learn over and over again and often the hard way, not empirically researched facts, but rather claims that we chose to believe in, or not. And the claiming of truths, is the nature of theatre. Our medium is in the end nothing more than the extreme reproduction of those mechanics that structure societies: we make a contract with the audience and ask them to suspend their disbelief. The Hothouse as we conceive it, thus becomes a metaphor for the theatre as well as for societal contracts. In Pinter’s microcosm, the agreement, the contract is to believe in what has always been believed in, namely the system in place (a fundamental principle of societies in place). We’d like to take that principle further and make it resonate with the fundamental principle of theatre itself: namely to accept whatever is claimed as the truth (for that moment in time and space). By breaking down and showing those mechanisms and consciously letting the reality of the theatre as a medium and space run in parallel to that of the play with its narrative, we aim to explore how thin the lines between different truths actually are. It is to be imagined as a reverse principle of Schrödinger’s cat experience: as long as no one looks out of the box, nothing can be proven wrong and the status quo can be preserved. The Change-Challenge And here, a play that seems to consist of pretty one-dimensional characters that at first glance might only fulfil a representational purpose (as Pinter has claimed himself) turns out to offer characters with the potential for depth and layers that are endless and truly human. The social critique 7 GRAND THÉÂTRE › STUDIO becomes a reflection on why we are so afraid of change. We try to under- stand, why an old white western male desperately tries to hold on to a system that has always been in place and why it is questioned so little – even by the ones that are further down the food chain – the so-called minorities (gender, ethnic, economical, belief,...) and find out that we are possibly all scared of change, because although a system in place might be oppressive, unfair and incorrect, it is most possibly the only one that we have and the prospect of having to instaure something new is often far more frightening. The white males have their obvious reasons not to change a system: even though crumbling, it is their reason of existence, they need to keep a rotten, nameless place – that potentially is even devoid of patients – going in order to keep existing. To explore the struggles that the minorities are facing in order to cut ties (there is a character called Cutts...) with a system that is not theirs is just as important. The absent and nameless patients are the voicelessly oppressed. They don’t exist for the oppressor in anything more than a number in a statistic (Say their name). The absurd tale that unravels in this micro society under a looking glass, in which everything develops faster, stands for all the physical and especially mental prisons that humanity should strike down and refuses to. It stands for any system in place (western, white, male, Christian, dominant) that feels like a prison to the majority of its people but that society as a whole still desperately holds on to. The Denial of Death On a metaphorical level, keeping a system in place is of course a mechanism to deny death. The big delusion is, according to cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, the basic human drive and it gives rise to “immortality systems”, or non-rational belief structures that give us a means to believe we’re immor- tal. Apart from the obvious ones that are religion and the longevity through the arts system, the most commonplace is the one of identifying with a group, a tribe, a society or nation that lives on into the indefinite future. In The Hothouse, Roote’s disintegrating mental state becomes not only a harbinger of his own end, but the image itself for the slow disintegration of the structure, the immortality system itself that so many depend on. The dilemma for the characters around him becomes real: if he dies and the system collapses, part of them might have to go with him. The decision at the end is: prolonging the system or allowing tabula rasa. 8 The Hothouse might well be, in all of those aspects, more relevant today than ever. While it was originally intended as a critique of British upper middle classes and bureaucracy, it now resonates with movements that address the question of where we stand with regards to death (and the denial of it) and exploring the mechanics of belief versus fact. Anne Simon (March 2021) 9 GRAND THÉÂTRE › STUDIO IN CONVERSATION WITH ANNE SIMON INTERVIEW LED BY JANINE GOEDERT JG: Why The Hothouse and not one of the better-known plays? After all, we do not often see a Pinter play on stage in Luxembourg. AS: I chose it because I am really interested in the “huis clos” Pinter so often writes about. In this regard, The Hothouse seems to me the obvious choice: the outside world could not be more inexistent and there lies the threat, really. Also, what I really like is the fact that it has more of a socio-political structure than many of the later plays which have a more personal basis. The play centres on how the system we live under works rather than on interpersonal stories. Yet it has the space to allow for these interpersonal stories. JG: Now, Pinter was legendary for refusing to explain what his plays were about. There is the famous quip: “This is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.” Will you be a bit more forthcoming and tell us what The Hothouse is about for you? AS: Well, I guess I am even less forthcoming… The play is a lot about theatre as well as about how societies are built, about how we agree to accept certain truths. We accept to agree since we have a contract to function as a society. The truths we are claiming have become our reality. And, in a way, that is what theatre is about, too. The play becomes a metaphor for theatre, whereas theatre is a metaphor for society. There is this doubling, this mirroring: this is the truth or structure we claim to believe in or we agree to believe in. Anyone that does not agree is our enemy. But then all these truths can be questioned from within, and that becomes dangerous as the system might crumble. It is a play about a group of people who believe in something. They need to go on believing in the system.
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