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REVIEW: Diary of One Who Disappeared
Most of the time when we go to the theatre we don’t know what to expect, but when it comes to Ivo van Hove, we do. It usually involves multi-media and unexpected context. In this latest allegorical incarnation, Diary of One Who Disappeared, he uses the obsession of 63-year-old married composer Leos Janacek who met simple, robust married Kamila Stosslova in the summer of 1917 and fell into a frenzy of deep, lusty love not as flamboyantly requited by the lady for their 11 years relationship. During this time he wrote prolifically, and this opera is one of his pieces laced with the heady perfume of obsession for the robust and musically illiterate Kamila, according to Janacek’s wife, Zdenka. The young man in the story falls in love with the gypsy whom he eventually gives himself to and subsequently leaves his homeland. For this work, van Hove has set the account in a contemporary photographer/filmmakers studio, fully maximizing on the lighting and use of technical equipment, like the lightbox to illuminate images, projector, and dark room, etc.
The stories intertwine between the yearnings of its older creator embodied in actor Wim Van Der Grijn. And the opera itself. An enthralling story, Diary For One Who Disappeared is about a young man and a Gypsy who has bewitched him, weaving the dreamy quality of both together, van Hove translucently makes the two dramas one in the telling of…
