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Ontroerend Goed: redefining the

boundaries of interactive theatre
As the Belgian company returns to the Edinburgh Fringe, Matt
Trueman assesses its impact
1
Matt Trueman
JULY 28, 2017

It’s August 2007, and I’m sitting in a wheelchair, wrists bound together,
blindfold on; my senses as active as I am passive. Birds tweet, crickets
chirrup, a watch ticks. Hands take mine, stand me up, then shove me against
a wall, hard. Perfume floods my nose. Whispers tickle my ears. A camera
flashes and whirrs. It feels intimate, generous even, but as I’m wheeled
backwards with my blindfold off, a wall of Polaroids comes into view. Then
other people in wheelchairs, all bound and blindfolded. A tape player
chirrups and tweets. Everything that felt so personal is, it dawns on us, a
production line. The Smile Off Your Face had introduced us to immersive
theatre with a startling rug-pull.
Ontroerend Goed theatre company, the creator of the piece, was whizzing
audiences around in wheelchairs long before the cult hit You Me Bum Bum
Train, and letting teenagers loose on stage years before the kids of
Company Three took their show Brainstorm to London’s National Theatre.
Based in Ghent, Belgium, Ontroerend Goed has been one of the most
influential forces on British theatre. Its inter-active shows triggered a burst
of one-on-one theatre across the UK. And Once And For All We’re Going To
Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen, with its snogging and sweary
youngsters, transformed the country’s perception of youth theatre. Now,
10 years after its first Edinburgh Fringe show, Ontroerend Goed is taking on
the financial system in a new interactive piece £¥€$ (LIES), which follows its
festival run with an international tour.
In those 10 years, Alexander Devriendt’s company has created some of the
most singular shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. Ontroerend Goed (the name
translates as “feel estate”, a property pun) seduced and betrayed its
audiences in Internal (2009) and manipulated them into a mob in Audience
(2011). Fight Night (2013) turned democratic politics into a popularity
contest, asking audiences to vote actors offstage, and World Without Us
(2016) imagined what would happen were humanity to end.
While not every show entirely worked, each was genuinely daring. “When
they’re on form, their work is simply the most thrilling and transformative
I’ve seen in a theatre,” says David Jubb, artistic director of Battersea Arts
2
Centre in London. “They provoke, titillate and challenge like no other
company.”
The group’s new interactive piece ‘£¥€$ (LIES)’, which takes on the financial
system © Thomas Dhanens That first Fringe was a gamble. After early
acclaim at home, Ontroerend Goed had come unstuck trying to make a
subversive soap opera for the stage. Devriendt tells me, via Skype, that they
“forgot what was fun in that”. Belgium, too, had started to feel small, with
the company’s touring circuit limited to a few cities. “We always try to make
theatre for as many people as possible without changing what we do or
dumbing it down,” the director says. Edinburgh offered a city full of theatre
nuts, and a “portal to the rest of the world”, but the financial risk was huge.
“People told us we were crazy.”
On arrival in 2007, they were inclined to agree. Its venue was in effect a
building site in the city’s Old Town: “a cellar with no electricity”. No
audiences either. “The first day, two people came, then two people we’d
met on the street,” he remembers. “The next day, four, then suddenly it
was sold out.” So the Fringe goes: word of mouth can catch like tinder,
hidden gems can spark a rush. Ontroerend Goed walked away with the
festival’s two biggest awards.
“Edinburgh was a turning point,” says Devriendt. “It was the moment that
defined us as an international company.” They’ve been back almost every
year since, with shows springing on to world tours thereafter. “It became
part of our DNA. It affects the sort of shows we make and how we think
about them.”
Provocation is a part of that. At a festival as crowded as the Fringe, sharing
a bill with literally thousands of other shows, it helps to stand out, and the
Belgians have a fine line in Fringe furores. Audience, an exercise in crowd
manipulation, singled out one female theatregoer for verbal abuse each
night, promising to stop on condition that she “spread her legs” for a video
camera. The first performance caused such outrage — one-star reviews all
round — that the company installed a plant thereafter. Internal coaxed
confessions from individual audience members, then simply shared them
with the group. Teenage Riot raised questions about exploitation and
manipulation.
Devriendt, however, is adamant that the shows never set out to court
3
controversy. “If art isn’t challenging, why bother?” he asks aloud. “I really
believe that.” But pushing boundaries inevitably means pushing buttons.
“Controversy exists in the eye of the beholder. I can’t control who sees
something as taboo. It’s different with everybody.
“Shocking an audience is easy,” the director continues. “I don’t ever want
to do that because it blocks any form of communication. It shuts people out
and it closes art down.”
For Devriendt, challenging theatre starts with form; new configurations ask
new questions of audiences. “That feels essential,” he says. “Theatre is only
very slowly redefining itself in relation to movies and television. Why do
something that works perfectly well on screen in a theatre? It has to be 3D,
a live, collective experience between audience and performers.” The point,
he says, is that anything is possible. “You’ve got this black box and you can
do whatever you want in there.”
So what exactly does Ontroerend Goed want to do? After 16 years making
theatre — the company started as a poetry collective — Devriendt “feels
like [the company has] just hit adolescence”. It is, in other words, growing
up. The shocks have slowed down, the shows have settled; more poetic,
less provocative. Sirens (2014) had five women in ball gowns lay out what
feminism meant to them, and earlier this year the company structured a
whole play like a palindrome: Are We Not Drawn Onward To New Era.
“There came a point where I realised we could make theatre. The question
became, ‘What will we do with it?’ Good speakers don’t try to prove they’re
good speakers. They say something.”
£¥€$ (LIES) is part of that. It drops audience members into a mock financial
system, seating them at six casino tables to trade fake stocks and bonds.
Early audiences have left boasting of newfound billions. Theatre is only very
slowly redefining itself in relation to movies and TV. It has to be 3D, live,
collective Alexander Devriendt
“Everybody was affected by the financial crisis and everyone, including me,
was like, ‘F*** these bankers. F*** this system.’ ” Devriendt wanted to
address that blame. “If you’re in their position, do you look at it differently?
There’s a visceral side to trading.”
He is fascinated that the financial system has largely survived, as the
public’s gaze shifts to other concerns such as Brexit, Trump and the refugee 4
crisis. “We’re not questioning that system any more,” he says. In that, he
agrees with the economist Thomas Piketty: reform will take a couple of
crises. Could £¥€$ (LIES) get things going? In Belgium, audiences have been
surprising. “A lot of bankers have come.”
But Devriendt worries about the ramifications of Brexit on Edinburgh Fringe
shows like his, with regard to artists’ visas and production costs. “I’m not
looking forward to it finally happening,” he says, pointing to the effort it
takes to tour to countries like Canada and Australia. Given its impact in the
UK, Ontroerend Goed would be a big loss.
£¥€$
Ontroerend Goed
Game-Performance

LIES) starts with everyone being allocated to a gambling table.

The croupiers portion out gambling chips for each person, where
everyone represents an investment sector of a government: Costa
del Keith, Arnold Coast, etc – the territories are named in honour
of the first person to sit down at the table. 5
£¥€$ (LIES) draws attention to the reality that money is
immaterial. After all, a £5 note states ‘I promise to pay the bearer
on demand the sum of five pounds’ – five pounds of what exactly?
This interactive theatre is about what happens when the faith in
money starts to wane, so when notes can’t deliver on this promise,
they are revealed to be merely paper and ink. The show is
designed to mirror the 2008 banking crisis. The premise is
masterfully executed and you find yourself full of stress and
consternation when the chips are down (pardon the pun). The
palpable tension is backed by a crescendo of synth; the music
climaxes as the scales fall from your eyes.
£¥€$ (LIES) calculates the profits and loses of territories in real
time. The smiling faces of the croupiers (the national banks) are
inviting to begin with: you win money by betting on the roll of a
dice. The stakes increase as time marches on: 1:1, 2:5, 5:15 – the
last one meaning that if you bet five chips (£5 million), then you
can end up with fifteen chips (£15 million). However, variables are
introduced into the arena: bonds, loans, shorts and mergers.
There’s quantitative easing and fractional reserve banking going
on to promote wealth, but these things can turn sour: picture
people in Zimbabwe paying for bread with wheelbarrows full of
cash.
The success of your territory becomes intertwined with the
interests of the central bank. It seems that there is no neutral
party anymore – all rely on each other, so loss must be avoided at
all costs. As chips are exchanged for loans, government bonds and
foreign bonds, the whole currency system begins to be polluted.
The simplicity of a smaller industry is obscured and bigger seems
better. However, being Goliath creates the danger of a
monumental fall.
By the end the money being exchanged isn’t real – bonds that
have replaced chips are built on crumbling trust as everyone
rushes to cash them in. The resources are non-existent; the gold
vaults are empty yet money keeps being printed. £¥€$ (LIES) is a
game of smoke and mirrors, but as the façade drops the banks are
sent spiralling back to square one. The central bank totals up the
losses and the deficits are truly hideous – hundreds of millions of
pounds have been lost in each territory. It becomes difficult to
keep track of who owns what and how the circumstances collapsed
so quickly. 6

The beauty of £¥€$ (LIES) is in its design. Devriendt has made

something truly genius and original. You don’t have to know
anything about accounts or economics to appreciate the
experience. The important thing that you take away from the
evening is just how rapidly markets can implode; £¥€$ (LIES) is
extremely well thought out and immersive in that respect.
£¥€$ | An interview with Alexander
Devriendt
Posted by Bo Marlijnen on 20 June 2017

£¥€$ (Lies) is the latest interactive show from the internationally

acclaimed Ontroerend Goed and marks our tenth co-production with
them, one of the most dynamic, innovative and exciting theatre
companies in the world. In our latest blog post, Artistic Director Alexander
Devriendt reveals his love for board-games and the influences for their 7
latest show.

After the large-scale theatre show Are we not drawn onward to new
erA and the more classic, text-based performance World Without Us,
Ontroerend Goed creates another interactive show. A return to the roots?

A.D.: Ontroerend Goed has a golden rule: we look for the best form to tell our
story. The Personal Trilogy was a search to make spectators reflect about
themselves through a personal experience, but also to release 1-on-1 theatre
from the bracket of intimate cuddling and create a dramaturgically strong
theatre show in that form. £¥€$ takes us one step further: the interactive
concept is employed to talk about a system in the world, to make it touchable
and comprehensible. To translate the complex razzmatazz of high finance into a
theatrical experience, I thought I would be more useful to immerse spectators
into it and let them play the role of a big investor. In that way, they can try and
look for solutions, instead of observing the complexity from a distance. It adds
the quality of an emotional quest to the rational exposition.

The financial world is a hot issue in the press and on social media. What
do you want to add to the subject?

A.D.: I read a lot of one-sided or simplistic comments about the financial world,
both in press and on the internet. Personally, I got a bit frustrated about the fact
that I myself didn’t quite understand the intricacies of the system. So I started
reading – about what money really is, how the financial world functions, what
went wrong during the crisis. It’s such a complex system, with a lot of abuse but
also a lot to offer. £¥€$ invites the spectator to build an insight into how things
work, step by step, in order to take an informed position of their own. Forcing
the super rich to give away all their money is probably totally useless, but it
might be worth considering to relieve certain debts.
By putting the audience in the position of the bankers or the infamous “1%”, I’m
not forcibly looking for sympathy, but I do want to make the inevitability or strict
logics of that world tangible. It’s partly motivated by greed, but we tend to forget
it’s also about the desire to shape the world and create opportunities.
You are a vigorous board gamer yourself, a passion that’s shared among
the members of your company. £¥€$ is again a game, with a certain role-
play quality for the audience. How do you develop an idea like this?

A.D.: Games are theatrically interesting because they provoke interhuman

emotions as well as thoughts and insights into certain systems. You could say
there are game- like qualities to the financial world, money could be considered
a score system in an enormous, world-wide virtual game. As a gamer, I think it’s
a challenge to transpose that reality into a theatrical ‘play’, that makes you both
feel and think. We’ve read a lot of literature during rehearsals – The Ascent of
Money by Ferguson, Debt by David Graeber, articles of Naomi Klein, Joris
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Luyendijk, Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism -, talked to experts, but we’ve also
played a lot of boardgames. This gave us a good idea of how you can
transpose big, abstract notions to simple, explainable actions at a game table,
without sacrificing the complexity. The performers in this show are more like
dealers, that teach you by means of poker chips how you change high risk
investments into toxic products that you can sell at other tables. In this game
formula, we don’t need to hold the spectators’ hands too much, they call the
shots themselves. It’s that boundary between performance and game that’s
exciting for us. We’ve explored this in A Game Of You – also a game – and
in Fight Night, but never as profoundly as now.

The title, £¥€$, seems to express a certain distrust in the financial system.
Does the performance take a strong position about it?

A.D.: Ontroerend Goed remains loyal to the notion that a performance should
be open enough to allow the audience to discover its own truth in it or to make
its own projections onto it. In this sense, the title £¥€$ is more of a provocation
than a judgement. There is a second layer, though. It has to do with the nature
of money in itself. In whatever form money appears, it’s always a convention, an
agreement between people: this measurable value against that measurable
value, sir x owes sir ythat much, this service or these commodities are worth
this much of our currency… in the end, everything’s based on trust. And what is
more destructive in a system of trust, than lies? It’s shocking for many people,
to come to the conclusion that the number on the digital screen of a cash
machine only has meaning, if everybody keeps believing in it…
 on at

There’s not much that’s conventional about A Game of You, the immersive
theatre project performed within a red-curtained box in the lobby of the
Harbour Centre. But one notable eccentricity is that instead of applause, the
audience acknowledges the actors’ impressive character work by writing a
message in the guest book. 9

“What a lovely little moment that was,” one guest writes.

“Didn’t realize I was such a douchebag until I was on the other side of the
mirror,” another says.

“L’expérience a été si salvatrice. Je l’ai grandement apprécié. À faire

absolument.”

“The experience has been so life-saving. I greatly appreciated it. Absolutely

worth it," from a third.

Some people write paragraphs. Some scribble only a few words. Presumably,
many leave without writing anything all. But as evidenced in the book, the
responses to this one-of-a-kind show are as diverse as the experiences of the
show itself.

Running 30 minutes long, audience members enter the maze-like set and are
guided through a number of rooms where everything you do and say is
incorporated into what comes next. Of course, there are the expected
technical stage tricks, as well as impressive improvisation from the actors. But
the biggest takeaways are the personal interrogations that A Game of
You forces you to make: about how you see yourself, how others see you, and
how the art we create (and consume) somehow always reflects pieces of
ourselves.

Stas Manouvakhov, the show's producer, tells the Straight that he wanted to
bring the show to Vancouver from the moment he walked out of his own
experience in Moscow, “laughing non-stop” after what he’d just experienced.

“Not because it was funny, but what happened inside short circuited my
brain,” Manouvakhov says.

He connected with Belgian playwright Alexander Devriendt, who then visited

Vancouver with his theatre company Ontroerend Goed, to help train the
actors and build the set.

Ontroerend Goed is notorious for works of immersive theatre, drawing

controversy for their fourth-wall breaking experiments. The 2004 show The
Smile Off Your Face blindfolded guests and pushed them through the set on a
wheelchair, subject to the whims of the actors. Their 2007
piece Internal involved audience members sharing intimate secrets with cast
members, only to have those secrets later shared with the entire assembled
group.

But A Game of You, the third piece in the trilogy, takes a softer approach to
immersive theatre. Manouvakhov says it isn’t meant to be scary or
uncomfortable. Even if you don’t say a word when you’re inside, the players
will find a way to build the show around you.

“There’s a difference between interactive and immersive. If people buy a 10

ticket, I don’t want to put pressure on them,” Manouvakhov says. “You’re a
part of the show, but even if you do nothing, it’s still a game of you.”

This is part of Manouvakhov’s goal—to create a work that anyone can walk
into and enjoy, without the bourgeois air of exclusivity that sometimes applies
to traditional theatre.

“In half an hour, an act can be as powerful as a three-hour show,”

Manouvakhov says.

Manouvakhov spent the first few weeks of A Game of You’s run hanging out in
the lobby, talking to people exiting the theatre, and he was warmed by the
range of responses—and the range of attendees.

“There was one 15-year-old kid the other day who said, ‘I’m actually an
interesting person. I’m going to change my career.’”

He then met an elderly couple from Florida who told Manouvakhov to “spread
it to the world.”

“They all say it was amazing for different reasons. To me, that has depth,” the
producer recalls.

If there’s one thing A Game of You teaches you, it’s that forced self-reflection
makes for impactful theatre. We often don’t think of our personas as
performance, or our daily lives as art. As one guest put it best, it’s a chance to
look at yourself as an interesting person. And it’s comforting to know that the
person behind you is, too.