Triumph!

Valentijn Dhaenens, Korneel Hamers, Mathijs F Scheepers and Clara van den Broek will be celebrating their 25th anniversary together as the SKaGeN theatre collective next year.

In recent years, the creators of SKaGeN have focused on solo performances, projects in which they were at the helm together – though not necessarily as a full ensemble – and exploring new media such as the SneakPeek app.

In Triumph!, the four of them return to the stage, joined by Dagmar Dierick and Clara Cleymans. Together, they draw inspiration from the story of the Swedish director Jan Jönson, who in 1985 decided to stage Samuel Beckett’s *Waiting for Godot* with prisoners from the high-security Kumla prison. A tense situation arises in which the prisoners get a taste of the outside world once more, whilst the play forces them to confront their hopeless state of waiting in two ways.

In Triumph!, the six-piece ensemble playfully navigates the question of what imprisonment and freedom, success and failure mean – for the characters, for themselves, and for the company. Are they in the same boat, or are they holding each other captive? Are they each other’s key to liberation? They are all searching for their own victory. We await a shared triumph.

SKaGeN don’t usually stick to a set repertoire. Nor do they manage to pull it off this time: in their typical style, they dismantle this classic and transform it into an energetic and playful performance that, at the same time, rubs a pinch of salt into the existential wound.