Your Words in My Mouth - Brussels Take review: A play casting its audience and cementing their eyes to the script

Inside a secretive meeting place, a small audience recreates a real conversation between Belgian residents. 

Freemasons' Hall and other venues, Dublin Theatre Festival

★ ★

Behind the doors of a secretive meeting hall, a small audience gathers for Your Words in My Mouth - Brussels Take, the play by Anna Rispoli, Lotte Lindner and Till Steinbrenner. Glinted light bounces off enormous gold-framed paintings, making you wonder how the other half live. 

That is also the idea of the play, in which the audience recreates a real conversation between a group of Belgian residents splintered by difference of opinion. By choosing a seat with a character’s name on it, you are cast in the part. You read a script with their words in it. 

There are some lively exchanges when one man, a lover, details his romantic situation with several partners, before being glibly shut down by another, morally superior man. An Israeli woman interested in the openness of polyamory, and marrying for a visa, gets challenged by a solicitor. 

Interestingly, director Anna Rispoli’s production has found ideas about love to be a lynchpin, as the play stretches across politics, gathering voices from the left and the right. An anti-immigrant member of parliament is played with cartoonish elan. Someone else becomes a trans refugee, low-voiced and tactful.

In serving these characters, it’s easy for your attention to turn inward. I, for instance, had to consider my approach to playing a black woman descendent of a famous musician from the Belgian Congo. I turn to another performer during a brief break. “I’m just reading my part. I don’t know what everyone else is doing,” he says.

That sums up something of a drawback. In a performance about seeing things from other people’s perspectives, we can’t really look at the play itself. Because we’re inside it. Eyes often seem cemented to scripts, rarely getting to look beyond the page. 

When I could focus on other performances, I was affected by one woman playing a physiotherapist who assists people with disabilities during sex. Overcoming the awkwardness of the details, she gave a compassionate and sensitive description of her character’s duties. Elsewhere, a man and woman playing ribbing siblings, nudged each other with friendly gestures. 

Without building towards an ending that has friction or high impact, the play is more memorable in glimpses. In an era riven by divisions, some people allow themselves to become someone else, and possibly even understand them. 

Runs until Oct 4th.