WijkJury Maastricht nominations 2022

Opera Zuid has housed the new District Jury Maastricht since October 2021. They visited performances in the Theater aan het Vrijthof, and had – sometimes heated – jury deliberations at our house. Despite lockdowns in the theater, our Neighborhood Jury was able to see and discuss enough to select three nominations from the performances visited…

Whoever is the favorite will be announced in August!

SHORTLIST

The three nominations of WijkJury Maastricht:

Een Meeuw, by Toneelgroep Maastricht.

Een Meeuw is an edit of ‘De Meeuw’ van Tjechov, by Ilja Leonard Pfeiffer.

In a setting in which the different seasons follow each other on the estate, we see a painful history of several relatives and friends who search for love and cannot find it. They seem like people who don’t really know how to live, often very funny, but also sad. It was a long sitting: 2 hours and 10 minutes without a break, but every minute of it was worth it. We saw strong actors with beautiful roles. Beautiful themes that are very recognizable to us, such as unrequited love, family ties, the meaning of life and the search for love. We really enjoyed.

GIF, by Carine Crutzen and Stefan de Walle.

A performance about an exciting and emotional meeting after years between two ex-partners who have lost their child. We thought it was very clever to see the two, in a decor of almost nothing but ugly funeral chairs and a gloomy winter landscape in the background, show how they slowly but surely get closer to each other on the other side of the emotional spectrum. A performance about love, too.

It affected jurors, also because the inability to let go of a deceased was recognized. One juror says: “I wanted to know how they would do, how they go on with life.”

Slachthuis Vijf, Theater Rotterdam.

It is a poignant story of Billy Pilgrim who -travelling through time- relives the bombing of Dresden. The jury is impressed by the performance of the protagonist Bram Sugar, who has behaved very well for almost the entire play, and the Humanity with which he does this is striking. We were sucked into it. It is an impressive story about processing traumatic war memories in a great stage setting with blinding white and red lights, and almost aching fiery streaks of light that seem like timelines that Billy traverses…

Thanks to it Theater aan het Vrijthof and Female Economy.