Staalkaart: The materiality of your words and images is striking. Many of your sets, made by Jean Bernard Koeman, are artworks in their own right. What purpose do they serve?"

Abke Haring: “The set has to transport the spectator to another place, take him into a different, abstract entity that makes him wonder where he is and why. That experience opens up his senses. At least that’s how it works with me: a play I don’t understand immediately keeps me on my toes, makes me look for answers, and the road I eventually take is often different from the usual one – that necessary deviation in your thinking is in itself interesting. The set is also, as you say, a real artwork – except that you cannot disassociate it from the movement of the actors, the light and the sound. All together we are the artwork."

Staalkaart: Thanks to Senjan Jansen’s score and Stefan Alleweireldt’s lighting, your plays always seem to be set in a world beyond time and space.
Abke Haring: “I try to create timelessness because in a play I prefer to deal with an idea or a situation rather than a story. That extended 'time' is really the expression, the visualization of an ultra-short moment of insight, the sort of moment that in reality only lasts a second. It is in that moment that man grows, and that is the moment I try to hold on to.