“Come back to me, Yvonne. I’ll stop drinking. Just come back, even if it’s only for a day.”, So writes Geoffrey Firmin, British consul in Mexico, to the wife who has left him. But he doesn’t post the letter.
On November 2, 1938, The Day of the Dead (All Souls Day), she walks into the cantina where he’s been drinking all night. What follows is a day spent fighting to save their relationship.
Malcolm Lowry based his novel Under the Volcano partly on his own life. No other book in the literary canon describes so ruthlessly, so poignantly, so poetically and with such fascination the world of the drunkard. It is the end of the 1930s and the world is on the brink of chaos.
Four people -- Geoffrey Firmin, the Consul, Yvonne Constable, his wife, Hugh Firmin, his younger brother, and Jacques Laruelle, boyhood friend of the Consul -- make a passionate attempt to give meaning to their lives.
For this production Guy Cassiers went filming in Mexico. Josse De Pauw adapted the novel as a play. He also portrays an impressive Consul.
director
- Guy Cassiers
text
- Josse De Pauw
after the novel by
- Malcolm Lowry
performance
- Bert Luppes
- Kevin Janssens
- Katelijne Damen
styling, set design
- Arjen Klerkx
- Diederik De Cock
- Enrico Bagnoli
costume design
- Katelijne Damen
production
- Toneelhuis
- Toneelhuis
- Josse De Pauw
coproduction
- Festival d'Automne à Paris
- La Comédie de Reims
- Le Volcan Scéne Nationale du Havre
- MC2 Grenoble
- Théâtre de la Ville de Paris
- Maison de la Culture d'Amiens
thanks to
- Marc Van Eeghem
