Hermit: Toying with philosophy by playing house
A physical theatre play brings young audiences face-to-face with a recluse.
The Ark - Dublin Theatre Festival
★★★☆☆
An attractive piece of handiwork, the wooden crate-sized box at the centre of Simone de Jong Company’s physical theatre play for young audiences is quite the achievement. If the careful movements of an inhabitant inside, his silhouette seen wriggling between domestic routines, make this cube a kind of shadow theatre, then a glimpse of unseen interior detail – miniatures of home appliances like a refrigerator and washing machine, neatly tucked into a corner – suggest a playhouse, in both senses of the word.
Playwright-director Simone de Jong seems interested in using the logic of children’s play to tell a story. The box is filled with the intrigue of a toy house – its borders grazed by torchlight shone from within by an unseen resident, before revealing innumerable openings that slide and hinge open, like little window shutters, doors or letter boxes. Through these gaps, we see an eyebrow or nose or some toes try to squeeze out, belonging to a folded-up recluse played by the endlessly flexible Toon Kuijpers.