this performance in Breda leaves a crushing impression

What is more important: losing a loved one here in the West, or large numbers of people dying in wars beyond our borders? Can one sadness be compared to another? Director Floor Houwink ten Cate explains this dilemma in the new performance Panic Room by Theater Utrecht.

The performance can be seen in Breda on May 8. Check all performance dates and locations and get your tickets via the website.

Actors Abke Haring and Jacob Derwig take you along in their impressive play. Moral dilemmas are the specialty of director and writer Floor Houwink ten Cate: “In my work I investigate the discomfort and pain of life. I do this by reducing major moral dilemmas to the human scale. At the same time, I want to really exaggerate underexposed problems in my performances.”

The story

The setting of Panic Room is a house in a No Man’s Land. Here two lovers meet again. One is sick and in denial of his inevitable, approaching end. The other is a war correspondent returning from a life-changing trip to a conflict zone. “Something very painful has happened in their lives that they don’t seem to want to discuss. In the performance they travel to that loss in a race against time, in an attempt to express it all before it is too late,” says Floor.

Read more under the photo >

Personal experience

This performance is very important for Floor, because she also brings back her personal experiences. Floor: “I am dealing with a second mother who is terminally ill. It’s upsetting that we’re going to lose her. Her disease process confronted me quite hard with death as an unexpected visitor in our lives, but also with the fact that here in the West we can do a lot to prolong someone’s life and have it end as gently as possible.”

“At the same time, I am of course also touched by all the wars that are currently going on in the world. Large numbers of people die there who have no choices, let alone a soft end, they are ‘simply’ wiped out. That is why this performance is about the question: where does the right to the longest life end and the responsibility for the death of someone else begin?

Floor brings that personal dilemma back to this story. “Somewhere things are going wrong for me. How can the two coexist, that personal grief and the grief for people thousands of miles away? Is one feeling bigger or more important than the other? I therefore chose, in collaboration with co-writer Esther Duysker, to intertwine these two storylines, because I think more people are concerned with this,” Floor explains.

Read more under the photo >

The circle is complete

The choice for Abke Haring and Jacob Derwig was easy for Floor. “Abke and I previously worked together on the performance Sea of ​​Silence about domestic violence. We immediately had a huge click on the floor and knew right away that we wanted to tell such an important story again. Then it was Abke who called me one day and said: shouldn’t I be in a duet with Jacob Derwig?”

That was one full circle moment for Floor. “The special thing is that, as a fourteen-year-old, I once saw a monologue by Jacob at Theater Utrecht and therefore wanted to go to the theater myself. Like no other, Jacob can make major human emotions tangible with enormous precision. Abke is a star at creating an intensely emotional moment through her physical acting and beautiful text handling, and through how she completely throws herself into the story with all her feelings. That seemed like a very beautiful combination with those worldly feelings.”

‘An exercise in dying and saying goodbye’

Floor herself calls the performance ‘an exercise in dying and saying goodbye’. “I want to get the audience thinking about that question of conscience: how does our own mortality or that of our loved ones compare to the mortality of people outside our national borders, in the rest of the world? Ultimately, it is about how you can be and remain human in this regard.”

Get your tickets on time

Don’t you want to miss the Panic Room performance in Breda? Then be there on time! It can be seen in Chassé Theater on May 8. Would you prefer another day? Check all performance dates and locations and get your tickets.