Belgian superstar director Ivo Van Hove first wooed London audiences in 2014 with a stark, unforgettable production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge at the Young Vic. Now, he’s returned to the same theatre with a work that’s slighter in duration and scale, but not in ambition.
This 80-minute monologue is explosive, a missile hurled at political elites who operate in blithe ignorance of the ordinary lives they stifle. It centres on a retired factory worker who’s not dead, but might as well be. Its star, regular Van Hove collaborator Hans Kesting, contorts his body into something broken, capturing the tortured physicality of a man who’s been crushed by decades of factory labour, by endless cigarettes, by the alcohol he uses to numb the boredom.
