Under the Volcano

In its postmodern form, theatrical direction is more concerned with recreating the world in a self-contained way than with rendering it faithfully. In this, it has been bolstered by the guilt-free assimilation of the electronic image. The art of the Belgian director Guy Cassiers (b. 1960) is very much in this mould.

In "Under the Volcano", a play based on Malcolm Lowry’s novel of the same title and staged at the Toneelhuis (2009), the filtering and reconstruction of reality is based on a melding of graphics and an authentically theatrical aesthetic. For the work, which relates the fall of an alcoholic consul on the Day of the Dead in Mexico on the eve of World War II , Cassiers and Josse De Pauw, who wrote the adaptation and plays the lead role, travelled to Mexico to film the environment in which the actual events took place. The result: a stage flooded with images of the exotic landscape processed to reproduce the consul’s illusory mental world. As the novel’s plot recedes, it makes way for a fragmentary sequence of images; while the actors sometimes disappear into the imagery and sometimes stand out from it, they are shrouded in a veil of loneliness throughout which accentuates the imaginary nature of the characters they play, all of whom have emerged from the memory of the narrator, Monsieur Laruelle.

The set recreates the desperate, intoxicated inner journey of the British consul, Geoffrey Firmin—played superlatively by Albert Finney in John Huston’s film—as he teeters for the last time between the “shakes of too little and the abyss of too much”, between heaven and hell, between his vital need for love and his rapid decline into loneliness and death.

Βased on the novel by Malcolm Lowry.