Voor het pensioen - Toneelhuis | Olympique Dramatique

Theater en toneel

The play takes place at the home of the Höller family on October 7, the birthday of Heinrich Himmler, former SS leader. Rudolf Höller, once camp commander and respected chairman of the court for years, is about to retire. October 7 is a high day for him and his sister Vera. Clara, their younger sister confined to a wheelchair, is on the sidelines of this celebration. She is burdened by the weight of the past and watches with sorrow as her family embraces the atrocities.

In the claustrophobic and incestuous house of the Höllers, an ideological power game unfolds. A party about guilt, resentment, denial and moral decay. And about family ties that can never be broken.

In Before Retirement, Bernhard exposes the powerlessness and hypocrisy of post-war Germany in relation to its own Nazi past, the silence about the war guilt. He expresses his disgust through the disturbing far-right rhetoric of his rigid characters. At the same time, Bernhard notes that we may not be much better ourselves.

Tom Dewispelaere does not simply stage this piece. The concrete reason is the disturbing normalization of a vocabulary and ideology that is the direct heir of the right-wing extremism of the 1930s and 1940s. Many statements that we thought had been pushed to the margins of our political culture are once again at the center of the social debate. It is an invitation to continue to reflect on how the shadows of the past continue to haunt us in the present. How far people go in their search for stability.