In Revolutionary Road, we meet April and Frank Wheeler, as well as a number of friends and colleagues. April and Frank are a beautiful couple. Life smiles upon them: home, garden, children, work… and love, so much love. They have it all. They dare to dream big and are determined to live life to the fullest. In order not to succumb to a narrow bourgeois existence in a society where conformity has become the highest good, they conceive the radical plan to leave everything behind and move to Paris to start anew. But they are overtaken by reality, and their dream is crushed. Out of frustration over their shattered dream, they turn their arrows on each other, turning their love into a nightmare.

Following the exploration of Ingmar Bergman’s work with Infidèles, the performance by tg STAN and de Roovers in 2018, we delve further into the realm of human failure with Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. The book embodies the quest for freedom and selfless love, and the immense strength and courage needed to radically change one’s life. In the theatrical version, these themes will become even clearer. More than in Infidèles, this story encompasses not only the relational aspect but also a pronounced social and political dimension, making it a ruthless critique of the suffocating and soul-crushing nature of societal expectations, and showing how difficult it is to escape them. While set in 1950s America, this story builds a clear bridge to today’s Western society. Think of the homogenization of thought, the neoliberal revolution, the ‘just be normal’ revolution of a country like the Netherlands, or the still rampant fear and aversion towards ‘the other’ in our own country. Revolutionary Road is a tale of the deceitfulness of domestic happiness, of apparent harmony behind which lies a world of despair, of love gradually turning against the other out of powerlessness, of what you truly think versus what you say, of who you want to be versus who you ultimately are of wanting to unleash revolution but getting lost in your own mind.

Two young actors, Ivana Noa and Flor Van Severen, take on the roles of April and Frank Wheeler, while Jolente De Keersmaeker and Robby Cleiren play all other roles. Two generations of actors with a great love for text aim to create a ‘huis close’ where they engage in fierce confrontations with Richard Yates’ razor-sharp dialogues. Something between Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and a string quartet by Dmitri Shostakovich.