LAVA LOUNGE - GUY CASSIERS - ro theater Rotterdam NL - 2002 Large venue production for the Rotterdamse Schouwburg, in a set, light & video design by Peter Missotten, directed by Guy Cassiers.
As a political statement, the production played for free during it's 13 presentations at the huge theatre of Rotterdam.
Text by Oscar van den Boogaard
"There is no doubt that in Lava Lounge the most imposing 'set' of recent years has been staged"(Hein Janssen, de Volkskrant)
LAVA LOUNGE takes place in a strange but at the same time very familiar place: a heart. An empty heart of a man. LAVA LOUNGE is like an "open heart surgery. The man lays open his heart and on it three women and himself play their parts, their plays of dependence, jealousy and manipulation. The man is surrounded by the desires of the three women and tries to satisfy them. The private becomes public, we see what we really should not see
The man and the three women once formed a family, a happy, harmonious family. Then came the bang, an explosion in which the family was torn apart. LAVA LOUNGE begins when Blitz, the man, looks up each of the three women after a long time: the woman on the carpet, the woman with the broken leg and the woman by the heater. Why does the man come back? Does he want to return to the world before the Big Bang, when everything was one and undifferentiated? Does he want to become the sun of the family universe, the center around which the three women revolve? However, all three women want to orbit the sun in the same orbit, as close to it as possible. That can only lead to another big bang.
