Jean Varela, director of the SortieOuest theatre in Béziers, invited Toneelhuis to stage Rouge décanté in 2011. As director of the Printemps des Comédiens festival in Montpellier, he has now scheduled the play again, along with Josse De Pauw’s Die Siel van die Mier (The Soul of the White Ant) and De gehangenen (The Hanged).  

“It is a play that wreaks havoc with the audience. A play in which fragments of images, sounds and words are stamped on your memory and continue to irk and fascinate you forever. Everything contributes to this: the fearsome script which tells the story of a boy who is interned with his mother in a Japanese concentration camp during the Second World War.  But also the mechanism which surrounds the actor on stage with cameras and microphones to project images onto gigantic screens and create acoustic islands, so that nothing can escape the ear and eye of the spectator. The faintest sigh, the minutest flicker of the eyelid, the slightest shiver, everything reverberates, everything becomes an image.
And then under that perpetual magnifying glass there is an actor for whom adjectives fall short: the extraordinary Dirk Roofthooft who has been performing this script in four languages all over Europe for five years. He is … magnificent? hypnotizing? heartrending? He is certainly all those things together. From the small boy confronted by horror to the adult whose relationship with his mother and women in general is affected for life, he spins a web in which even the most recalcitrant spectator becomes entangled. A festival sensation.”
–from the Printemps des Comédiens festival programme

Next season Bezonken rood will be staged as Rouge décanté and as Sunken Red in Pilsen (CZ), Ottawa (CA), Montreal (CA) and Calgary (CA).