Images of Freedom

Jan Lauwers found his niche as a director during the New Wave of theater and dance in Flanders in the early 1980s, a movement inspired, in part, by exposure to experimental theater from the United States and the Netherlands. After years of experience with a Belgian collective, Lauwers started Needcompany in 1986 and over the years has built an internationally recognized company that attracts some of the finest actors and dancers from around the world.

Although created in Brussels, Lauwers's productions are almost always performed in several languages, quoting from a wide array of original sources. Needcompany actors perform the provenance of a text as part of its implicit meaning rather than obscuring it through translation or folding it seamlessly into a covering narrative. A significant variation from this working method is Lauwers's acknowledged masterpiece, The Snakesong Trilogy, a meditation on eroticism, violence, and death, written and performed in his native Dutch. Created over four years, the trilogy began with Le voyeur in 1994, continued with Le pouvoir in 1995, and concluded with Le désir in 1996. In 1998 Lauwers restaged the entire work to great acclaim at the Lunatheater in Brussels.

Needcompany is best known to New York audiences for their 1999 production of Morning Song at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), the second of a two-part work entitled No Beauty for Me There, Where Human Life Is Rare. The first installment, Caligula, modeled after Albert Camus's play, premiered at Documenta X in Kassel in 1997. During the summer of 2001, Lauwers shot his first feature film, Goldfish Game,a drama that follows the unusual cast of characters from Morning Song in their continuing entanglement of family, politics, and perilous appetites. Morning Song earned Lauwers an Obie and ensured his return to BAM in 2001 with King Lear, the most recent example of his ongoing commitment to directingdifficult and idiosyncratic adaptations of Shakespeare. Previous productions include Julius Caesar (1990), Antony and Cleopatra (1992), Macbeth (1996), and Ein Sturm (2001), a radical interpretation of The Tempest.

Lauwers's interest in the materiality of language and the legibility of objects, a carryover from his work as a painter and sculptor, has helped to define his theatrical imagination. Need to Know (1987), his first venture with Needcompany, was a forceful collage of television, dance, and Shakespeare that toyed with traditional ideas of spectatorship and theatrical composition. The tensions among different languages and the confusion produced by the confluences and contradictions of speech, text, and image are indicative of Lauwers's signature style. His stage is a veritable minefield of changing significations, more unstable than ambiguous, and sometimes so playful it almost feels dangerous.

King Lear carries on this exploration in a fashion that has matured and evolved over the ensuing years. Spectators watch Shakespeare's verse appear, in its original English, on an LED screen hung from the flies as characters speak their corresponding lines in a variety of languages, including Dutch, French, Italian, and—occasionally and with strange effect—English. In the fifth act, Lauwers stages the battle scene as an explosive rehearsal where actors writhe and scream their incoherent lines to blasting music and chaotic lighting as a sadistic onstage director relentlessly moves the narrative through its bloody depravities. Like Morning Song, King Lear ends with excessive scenic effects that threaten to consume the accumulated meaning of the preceding acts. The stage is transformed into a force of nature comparable to the heralding storm: broken mirrors assemble in the half-light to form rough, oversized letters partially visible through the smoke, abandoned from their imagined sentence—a comment, perhaps, on the combustibility of meaning when pressed to its limit by violence.

Lauwers plays a risky but exciting game with the theater, one that often commences in boredom, as actors refuse the conventions of realism yet seem to falter in their search for an alternative, and concludes in terror, as the singular power of the stage is unleashed in a barely...