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Front explores the Western front from all sides of the trenches in Belgium. Belgium played a special role in the “Groten Oorlog”, the Great War: despite its neutrality, was turned into a battlefield by and for foreign powers. Front, a Polyphony... is based on documents and literary accounts from four European countries, in order to create a multi-perspective view of events, with actors from all the countries involved in this war. One of the sources is Erich Maria Remarque’s AH Quiet on the Western Front. It is one of the most widely published books in the world and has been translated into more than 50 languages. It tells the story of Paul Bäumer, a nineteen-year-old boy who, together with fellow classmates, voluntarily signs up as a recruit in the armed forces. Paul Bäumer gave a face to the generation that returned traumatised from the Great War, a war dominated by trench warfare which on some days cost tens of thousands of human lives.

“The performance begins with a bugle call and nine actors file on to the stage. In shabby suits and white shirts they could have come from work. They line up across the front of the stage at music stands and sit down on beer crates with their reading lamps shining up on their faces. They begin to report their experiences at the front. In one grim scene a shell explodes among horses. We don't hear the horses; it is the men's agonised responses that we hear as the animals lie neighing frantically for days in no man's land where no one from either side can reach them. The stage is open all the way back to the firewall where designer Annette Kurz has mounted a 40ft panel made up of 320 tin tiles. She has treated these to look like plaster in imitation of a photograph of a ceiling on the Titanic, a little contribution to Perceval’s reimagining of the war in the trenches as “the last dance on the Titanic". On this huge panel a slow succession of images from the time is projected: blackened faces, bandaged heads, blindfolded eyes, amputees, deserters, then nurses, families back home, and generals in dress uniforms.” Hugh Rorrison, The Guardian

Main programme

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