Discovered by a flabbergasted Belgian audience when his terrifying and hugely fun Murx den Europäer! Murx ihn! Murx ihn ab! Ein patriotischer Abend (Do Away With the European !...) came to the first KunstenFESTIVALdesArts in 1994, today Christoph Marthaler is acknowledged even outside Germany and his home country of Switzerland as one of the greatest European theatre directors. The artist has lost none of his humour, energetic commitment or exuberant creativity. Now he has returned to Brussels to settle his visionary, tender, caustic and critical gaze on human nature.

It is March 2006 and Marthaler is in Brussels to live through the entire rehearsal process of a new theatrical creation produced by the KunstenFESTIVALdesArts. In his bags he has the score to Monteverdi's Incoronazione di Poppea, and his view is that "there will perhaps remain a link to it of some kind, or perhaps nothing". He is fully preoccupied with allowing the secrets of this Brussels that inspires him and intrigues him to come to the surface in complete freedom amidst his "family" of actor-singers caught up here in a mysterious family secret. For Marthaler specialises in secrets: the ones people are too ashamed to mention but which seep out in strange or uneasy behaviour to affect voices, stiffen bodies and split open individuals and the core of who they are with clumsy, painful and droll outbursts. A director of these silent people, he unearths the fragility of the losers, their wants, the spiralling of their dashed hopes, of their childishness bound up in habit or in obsessive dreams... Winch Only gets its flesh and imagination from three primary sources: Poppea, where the beautiful lovers are common assassins; the family in the midst of a conflict - "happiness is for TV series, what a bore!"; and Brussels "so beautiful in its ugliness!" Following in the footsteps to some extent of François Schuiten and Hugo Claus...

Brussels, 28 March 2006

"This is not a... Poppea!" says Christophe Marthaler, paraphrasing Magritte who gave a similar title to his painting of the famous pipe. The director and his team have been in Brussels since 25 March. In the basement of the smart KVS Box, they are rehearsing using a rough layout of the set, anticipating the one that will eventually be used in the performance. On a table in a corner is its finished replica, built on a reduced scale, the model that Anna Viebrock - the set designer and Marthaler's invaluable artistic partner - has designed for this new creation, for and with Brussels. The first tangible object to bring into being the paths of a project to be realised: decisive, rousing, astonishingly accessible and extending an invitation for its future inhabitants to be invented.

Inspiring (and inspired by) Marthaler, Anna Viebrock and her collaborator Frieda Schneider have disseminated in it the signs of a constantly evolving universe, a surreptitiously distorted universe whose very details betray Brussels. Everything has a logical and well-constructed air to it, nothing is as it seems: there is an enclosed interior but it is wide open to the loft; a bourgeois sitting room with inert doors and vanishing staircases; a central fireplace with a large black hearth, perhaps a passage leading to the darkness of people and cities... A gallery tops it all, overhanging the void, surmounted by an incongruous circular rail.

"When we go on tour to Parma we could hang legs of ham from it!" laughs Marthaler while Anna Viebrock gives her evocative description: "I discovered this rail with a rotary mechanism in the costume store at the Opéra Garnier in Paris. Romantic tutus were hanging from it... upside down. Like angels or... dead chickens. As in an abattoir! The set is littered with ambivalence like that. It looks realistic, but it's innervated with the surreal. It encloses, but lends itself to secret passageways. Unsuspected rooms or parallel realities? No one knows, not even us!" "Anna's involvement in my work is essential", continues Marthaler, "she makes the spaces so inspiring!"

Winch Only is one of Marthaler's completely open productions in which no constraining material pre-exists the creation, where time is taken for feeling their way, investigating outside as much as inside the studio walls. In these early rehearsals, each one of them settling in is strangely akin to people moving house... that way of taking possession of a place and its context, as if the entire team, delighted by the change, are enjoying themselves inhaling huge lungfuls of the surrounding air to merge in with it better and discover again their lair of "Marthalian" characters, powerless strangers plagued by latent outbursts ... This latency, their agitated expectation, from now on tinged with the feeling of the city, the sediment of its atmosphere ...

Starting with our huge Palais de Justice which Schuiten and Peeters claim hides a rite of passage... to Brüsel. "This palace is such a shock! Its titanic architecture really does give the impression that it's straight out of a comic strip..." exclaims Anna Viebrock. Marthaler, fired up, continues: "This little country has the biggest monument to justice in the world! You only have to look at it to feel guilty! It's Kafkaesque!" "The furniture for the set is real furniture that has been thrown away. It's fairly dilapidated", continues Anna. It is very important that this furniture "is" real and not a faithful reproduction. They have had a previous life that has worn them out and particular sounds..."

Back at the studio, in the rehearsal space, Rosemary suddenly starts singing a great tragic aria from Massenet's Werther - They do you good, my darling! Tears that one does not weep... - accompanied on the piano by Bendix. The actors, slouching on old benches for defendants, collapse - it is hard to tell whether as a result of laughter or tears. An outburst by a character not unlike Tintin's Bianca Castafiore versus compelling vulgarity. Hearing them, Marthaler absent-mindedly swivels a shabby office chair on castors. It squeaks. Delighted by his find, he makes every effort to operate it as you would a metal saw. The singing continues, now accompanied by a recurrent, very high-pitched and obsessive creaking... Marthaler savours every moment.

"We still don't know what we're going to do", he says. "The prerequisite first of all is to create a real group of actors, capable of understanding each other and what everyone's feeling. And the best way to do that is to sing or eat together! We sing a lot and improvise. We always do that when we're not dealing with specific work on a play or opera. We have to get to know each other and our voices first. We can do this because the group is small (six people): a family of actors and singers that will become a family of characters or seemingly family, for it will be pretty impossible to say who is the father or the daughter or the cousin or the aunt... In any case, these are condemned people. Whether by a punishment of the law or their own punishment? We don't know. They're obviously quite an odd, horrible family - it's much more exciting that way!... A kind of community of destinies."

Finding out more about the Palais they visited, Marthaler and his team have discovered the existence of a - real or legendary - hairdresser's, a post office and cells next to the criminal courts. "Maybe the characters in Winch Only are close relatives of this hairdresser, put there for life, or plain visitors who've got lost and who, unable to find a way out, have started living in the Palais to recreate a family, or maybe they've been detained in a cell waiting to be sentenced and sense the presence of other people in other cells ... Perhaps, a very long time ago, they were just as in love and just as monstrous as Poppea and Nerone..."

Maybe they are just as tied together as the characters in Claus's novel, Omtrent Deedee, which became Het Sacrament in the cinema: a family gets together every year for a dinner to celebrate the anniversary of the mother's death, a reunion tipping over into a settling of scores, oozing terrible demons and buried guilt.

Perhaps...

It is an open work, passing through bodies and silence as much as through voices. With Marthaler words, gestures, actions, music and the connection between them seem to be under the influence of a musical theme. Everything is to be composed. Except for the space which is filled with memories and the future. Except for the title: Winch Only, gleaned from a boat between Naples and Lipari. A landing pad on the deck intended for helicopters, marked by a circle of white paint, too small for a landing: "winch only". The only way to load and unload on shore, the hoist moved by the gearing. An allusion? Certainly a playful image...

Claire Diez