Mystical Body

Koen Verheijden | Toneelschuur Productions

do 22 Oct '26 20:30

About people who love each other, but do not tolerate each other

play

Thu 22 Oct '26

20:30

Thu 22 Oct '26

20:30

On location: Pand P - Great Hall (Leenderweg 65)

Tickets

Forty years after the publication of Frans Kellendonk's controversial novel, director Koen Verheijden brings the story back to the play. In his characteristic, layered language, Kellendonk captured a year in the life of the broken family Gijselhart.

Welcome to the Doornenhof, a run-down villa in the 1980s. Father and widower Gijselhart (played by Kirsten Mulder) lives there with his adult children. First one, then both. At the Doornenhof everyone thinks he is locked up and that the other should be locked up.

Utterly conservative and obsessed with money and purity, he is diametrically opposed to his progeny. Daughter Magda (nicknamed Prul) is unmarried and pregnant by a Jewish man and son Leendert returns from New York as an AIDS patient. Old wounds reopen. And when the father of Prul's baby appears on the scene, a confrontation is inevitable...

Verheijden opts for a grotesque, sometimes raw-comic style of acting in which humor and discomfort exist side by side. Not to judge, but to make visible how people can lose each other. Especially when they try to hold on to each other.

Excluding consumption
With surtitles in Dutch and English

Credits

Directed by Koen Verheijden Inspired by Frans Kellendonk's Mystical Body Text Koen Verheijden Play Teunie de Brouwer, Kirsten Mulder, Michael Muller, Marley Verbeem