AP: Werktoneel - Aan de start van de brug

What causes man to want to overcome his mortality? Together with NTGent, Werktoneel is creating a brand new play, successor to the highly successful ‘Gruis / aan de twijfel’.

‘Sublime acting. The new generation has arrived and it is here to stay.’ That's what De Standaard wrote about Gruis / aan de twijfel (2023), voted best theatre play of the year. The play, based on the oeuvre of Willem Frederik Hermans, bombarded collective Werktoneel as the darling of audiences and press.

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Describing major social phenomena from hyper-personal stories and worlds. This is something the classics of Werktoneel (Jesse Vandamme, Louise Bergez, Joeri Happel, Lucie Plasschaert, and Lucas van der Vegt) can do like no other. Whether it is about madness and fear (Solipsists), climate and capital (Giants), love and marriage (Scenes), or success and failure (Gruis / to the doubt). In At the Start of the Bridge, they approach the ultimate human phenomenon: the dormant awareness of our temporality.

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The show is an exploration of how people deal with their mortality and what inventive - sometimes absurd - ways they come up with to avoid, and even overcome death. Trying to outsmart their existential fear of death, the characters dive into a tunnel of cronyism, Silicon Valley ideologies, and longevity research. The outcome of their perverse experiments is highly uncertain. As guinea pigs, they are at the start of a bridge that most likely leads nowhere.