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stage. The woman is the issue here, the object of the men's gaze, desire and power. It is around her body that the male gaze (aesthetic, voyeuristic, pornographic) takes shape. But is she not at the same time the blind spot in man's eye, to which all looking returns, has to return, once it has unmasked its own desire? And does this return not create the possibility of another sort of looking, very temporary and very fragile? 8. In 1993 Jan Lauwers said, "In Need to Know, the first play by Needcompany, you see a woman crying her heart out and you hear a lamento by Mozart. I might use the same music today, but you would no longer hear the woman crying. The tears have dried up. The woman tries to cry some more but they are tearless sobs. Even though she feels an intense sadness, she can no longer cry. The annoying thing is that this intense sadness has not gone away." This image of the woman who cannot cry comes from the opening scene of Le Voyeur, the first part of The Snakesong Trilogy. Isabella does not cry either, but in her case the intense sadness has gone. She has lost her lovers, but she feels no loss, no sorrow, no rage: "No deep stirring of the soul. No emotional coquettishness." Lauwers experiments with his philosophy of life through the medium of the female characters in his work. In the successive portraits of women that occupy an increasingly compelling place in his plays, we discern a profound existential reflection. Is Isabella a new step, a new insight, a new attitude to life? In her,'indifference' seems to have been overcome. 9. Isabella is blind: her seeing has come to an end. But she is a participant in a scientific experiment whereby images are projected directly into her brain by means of a camera. In the end she will also distance herself from these images - the objects in her room - when she comes to an ultimate realisation. lsabella:"Look, here, the photo ofthe man with the beard. The man born out of a lie; my desert prince. He will always remain. Unlike Anna, Arthur, Alexander and Frank: gone. For good. He is the only one that still exists, my desert prince. When I switch off my camera, I see him crystal-clear: Felix. F.E.L.I.X. And that means'happiness'in a dead language. Sham and illusion."lt is on the basis of this constantly repeated lie that Lauwers creates his plays: the lie ofthe imagination as an answerto the lie of reality, in the ultimate realisation that happiness can only be written in the letters of a dead language. Laugh and be gentle to the unknown.