For his new production for the large auditorium De indringer (The Intruder), Peter Missotten draws on an adaptation of Maeterlinck’s one-act play L’Intruse (1890) and throws in ingredients from horror films. He and his actors create a stifling world which appeals to our primary fears: a dark wood, the other person, the unknown, death.

De indringer homes in on these fears, but also on our fascination with them. Fear petrifies us - literally, but it also affects us to the depths of our being. Missotten creates a dark and oppressive world peopled with slow, stilled figures. We witness something we would prefer not to witness, but we are entranced. The malaise reaches dizzying heights. “It’s what we try to get away from throughout our lives”, said actor Boris Karloff on the subject of horror. It is the fear that somewhere in our reality there is an aperture, a gaping black hole into which we are in danger of disappearing.

I can feel steamrollers on my eyes! Girls, tell me what is going on here! Please tell me, those of you who can see. I am here, all alone, in a bottomless black hole. I have no idea who is next to me. I have no idea what is happening a couple of steps away from me. What are you discussing so quietly?

Peter Missotten loves auditoriums as much as he loves the theatre! He likes to turn them into idiosyncratic constructions. Each new set is a new auditorium, a new theatre machine. For his production De wilde wilde weg (On the Open Road) he built a catwalk that extended deep into the auditorium of the Bourla and he had the audience look down on it from the balconies. In WeerSlechtWeer the spectators sat with headphones round a glass cage in a park. In Kwartet (Quartet) the audience lay on the ground and watched the actors performing on a suspended platform. With Peter Missotten ‘looking’ is never something that is done neutrally from an easy chair; there is always something that spooks our watching…

De indringer is no exception. Again Missotten creates an extraordinary atmosphere in the Bourla. He takes the audience with him on an uncanny trip on which it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between fear, unease and fascination. “Before you die, you see”, the audience is warned.