Where The World Is Going, That’s Where We’re Going

Belgian theatre company Hof van Eede are trying to tell a story, and they’re failing. Their two performers are trying to give us the lowdown on Diderot’s bawdy picaresque Jaques the Fatalist, but the book’s meandering style has infected them. Their explanation stutters and stalls, they can’t agree where to begin, they barely make a start. They think that’s maybe okay. That it might be for the best.

Where The World Is Going… celebrates an often overlooked ability of language – the power to say nothing definite at all, to revel in the discursive and the unhelpful. A casual, careful, perfectly flippant but undeniably serious dialogue that tiptoes around the edges of its themes, it’s a celebration of journeys and a rejection of destinations.

Performers Jeroen Van der Ven and Ans Van den Eede play things very low-key, hinting at a vague relationship largely through the tone of their passive-aggressive bickering. Each wants to speak about love, and beauty, but each is aware that the acts of definition or description are at best futile and at worst damagingly reductive.

It’s a smart work that deepens in the memory, but as appropriate as its content-matching form is, it’s also extremely dry. Going nowhere slowly may be what Diderot would have wanted, but it’s really boring. A few moments of humour offer sustenance in these arid wastes of hesitation and digression, but as easy as it is to respect, this is a difficult show to love.