In How Goes the World, four performers enter an absurd orgy of entrances and exits, sound cues, and memories.

​​​​​​They exit and enter through doors somehow separated from walls, rushing to be part of a play that either hasn’t started or else ended decades ago. They slump to the sofa, weeping. They rise from the armchair in anger, then collapse again like amnesiacs. They head downstage to stare from a window that doesn't exist anymore. A piano plays the same tune repeatedly, grinding and warping its’ melody.

With Tim Etchells, NTGent adds a big name to the list of (inter)national artists creating a brand new play for the Histoire(s) du Théâtre series. Etchells’s contribution to the series uses a fragmentary quotation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth as its title: "How goes the world".

"Go see it," Belgian leading newspaper De Standaard advised back in September, "because as founder of the legendary British company Forced Entertainment, Etchells himself is a bit of living history. His absurd, philosophical, poetic lyrics always twist your perspective on reality."

Four performers come and go in a confusion of roles, costumes, scene changes, and light effects. Butlers, servants, messengers, soldiers, doctors, lovers, murderers, dancers, drunks, scoundrels, liars, and innocents are all here, along with queens and kings in tattered robes, all of them wailing in the fake snow that falls somewhere between the bookcase, the coffee table, the dead tree and the ironing board. A storm outside. A war in the distance. The sound of applause.