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.
Etchells’s contribution to the Histoire(s) du Théâtre series of Belgian theatre NTGent uses a fragmentary quotation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth as its title: “How goes the world”.
In the work 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, all of them wailing in the fake snow that falls somewhere between the boarded-up window, the coffee table, the piano and the ironing board. A storm outside and inside. A war in the distance. The sound of applause.
Belgian theatre maker Alexander Devriendt (Ontroerend Goed) meets Tim Etchells in London to talk about ‘How Goes the World – HDT V’ on Soundcloud here.
CREDITS
Performed by Aurélie Alessandroni, Neil Callaghan, Aurélie Lannoy, John Rowley
Text Tim Etchells
Concept & direction Tim Etchells
Dramaturgy Matthias Lilienthal
Dramaturgical advice Benoît Vanraes
Music composition & sound design Graeme Miller
Light design Dennis Diels
Set design Tim Etchells & Chris Vanneste
Costume design Jo De Visscher
Production NTGent
Coproduction Tandem Scène Nationale (Arras-Douai), Wiener Festwochen
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L’Addition, 2023 
Heartbreaking Final, 2021 
This Instrument, 2020 
A Broadcast / Looping Pieces, 2014