Synopsis

n Rob de Graaf’s plays people attempt to live according to ideals. They are frustrated in this by the demands of (capitalist) society, which promotes banal human feelings. The utopian bond that the characters forge breaks down because it cannot withstand the influence and attraction of the surrounding world. The characters, as contemporary world citizens, are so fixated upon consultation and compromise that they allow their ideals to be swept aside without too much protest. Which produces plays without great dramatic conflicts, but with a perceptible implicit struggle against meaninglessness, against the powerful stream of the ‘totally awful everyday’ as Darm calls it in De biel.
Two men live together in De biel because they have ‘found each other as brothers’. They call working people ‘bielen’ (from the Dutch word for morons). In their form of ideal life the men take it in turns to be the other’s ‘biel’, to provide for the other’s sustenance on alternate days. The biel has to clean an office block and do the shopping. Moreover, the two never go out of doors, or preferably not: this would breach their safe co-habitation, dedicated to silence, abstinence and equilibrium. They remember a trip to a hotel in Wijk aan Zee, a Dutch coastal town, as a horror story, full of people clad in black with food that looks like vomit.
And yet the temptation of the outside world is always ominously present; in Oswald’s proposal to go out sometime; in Darm’s proposal to invite someone for dinner. The bond really breaks down because of the meeting with – a woman. The sight of the woman behind an office desk with her pink polished nails and blond hair seduces Darm into relating everything about Oswald and himself. But also the poetry, rhyming, destructive language, which bubbles up in Oswald’s head, undermines their bond. A woman and art; these things breach the brothers’ idealistic co-existence. Fear conquers trust. Ultimately, the men have to conclude that it is not possible to live together in isolation. They partition themselves off individually. And from then on they both have to be the biel every day.

Deze tekst is een bewerking van
De biel

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onbekende vertaler (De biel (E), engels, 2002)