When the Flemish author Maurice Gilliams died at the age of 82, he had yet to complete Gregoria, a work he’d started forty-five years earlier. Half a lifetime was not enough to complete a novel about this dark period of his life. The story is partly about a time that should bring happiness to every lover: the honeymoon period. For Gilliams, however, both the wedding day and the traditional wedding trip that followed was a nightmare. The engagement period foretold little that was good: hysteria and frigidity characterized the girl of his dreams. She scarcely allowed him to touch her, while he was over-sensitive and weak willed. He wrote poetry. How it all ended in marriage is described in hallucinatory fashion in Gregoria.

The story unfolds against the background of the increasing modernization of Antwerp in the 1930s. As the daughter of a candle factory owner, she belongs to the nouveaux riches. He is the offspring of impoverished nobility -- or at least that’s what he wants us to believe. The cherished but degenerate past haunts the new world. He can't seem to live in this time. Is Gregoria a book about love? It is a horror novel, a gothic novel. Bart Meuleman transforms it into a theatrical tour de force.