Do you have any couple friends that, when you hang out with them, at a restaurant maybe or in a pub, give you that feeling that there is something that's not being said, or to put it another way, a lot is being said, everything perhaps, but not one thing, the most important thing? If this does feel familiar, then you will know what is to spend the evening caught up in the kind of passive aggressive repartee of the characters He and She in Where the world is going, that's where we are going. He is a writer who would prefer to dream than write. She is a writer who prefers to delete. They are both here, in a room furnished with plush chairs largely left unused, much like Sartre's waiting room in No Exit, to tell us about Diderot's book Jaques, the fatalist and his master. Although they don't actually tell us about the book at all. This is a story about everything 'not literally everything, that would be impossible' and nothing. It is a performance full of words which tell us everything without words, it tells stories but is plotless, a 'language party' where all of the important information lies in the spaces between. It's a show that hides its meaning in plain sight, like a cryptic crossword.
It
takes a great deal of skill to create the intricacies of such
conversations and Jeroen
Van der Ven and Ans Van den Eede
(who
also co wrote the piece) capture the natural ebb and tide of
conversation perfectly; the tangents which can often become the story
itself, the eloquent subtext, the touch on your partner's arm which
says I want you to shut up but only because I love you. They are both
charming and funny and irritating in the way that white middle class
literary people can be. Spending time with them was a pleasure but
too much would remind me of the sort of purgatory Sartre once
described as 'Hell is other people.'
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