Ivo Van Hove

|2023 Creation

Belgian stage director Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s sultry novel My Heavenly Favorite, a heart-wrenching tale of forbidden love between a man and a teenager damaged by life.

At the peak of a radiant summer, a veterinary visit a farm to care for its cattle and soon meets the farmer’s daughter. Between the 49 years old man and the 14 years old child, a relationship forms, made of secrets and mutual trust, envisioned as an outlet from their frustrated lives, their traumas and dead-ends. Until the unacceptable happens. Carried by a dizzying writing style, an uninterrupted flow of words, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s novel embraces the adult’s perspective in an approach both raw and nuanced. It is this troubling balance that Ivo van Hove here translates, staying true to his taste for incandescent staging, where video, lights, and music all hold equally important places. In Mon bel animal, this music acts as a mirror for our times and as a medium for emotions: characters lose themselves in it, projecting their desires and nightmares to the beat of pop songs. On a stage overran by hay where different species co-exist, performers deliver a vibrant rendition.