De Vader

De Vader (The Father) is the new production by Marieke & Sophia, based on August Strindberg’s bourgeois drama of the same name (1887). Together with Anna Franziska Jäger and Rodrigo Batista, they have reworked this misogynistic play into a hybrid performance. What if Strindberg’s reactionary worldview is less outdated than we think?

In the original plot, Adolf, the head of the household and military professional, finds himself in a deep crisis after his wife suggests that he might not be the real father of their child. Who is the patriarch now, without power over his own flesh and blood? At the end of the play, the hero dies in a straitjacket, mentally ill and broken. Wife and daughter are left triumphant.

Sophia and Marieke take Strindberg’s fear of obsolescence as their starting point. What would a world without men look like? From a love-hate relationship, they perform fluid, alternative forms of (male) authority.

On stage, the familiar form of the living-room drama clashes with strategies from performance art. Classically staged dialogues are interwoven with video footage, body art, song and artificial landscapes. The figure of the father shifts from patriarch to victim — and sometimes even to Daddy. Through eroticisation, role reversals and a playful engagement with pornographic clichés, the creators subvert the gaze: the male body becomes an object of desire.

Inspired by feminist body art from the 1960s and 1970s and by artists such as Carolee Schneemann and Ana Mendieta, Marieke & Sophia construct a hybrid form of theatre in which fiction and reality constantly merge.

De Vader is a sensory, confrontational and playful performance about masculinity, power and the cultural scripts that shape our thoughts and desires. A living-room drama that transforms into an arena, where patriarchal myths are dissected, distorted and reimagined.