My dinner with André

PERFORMANCE IN TWO VERSIONS, DUTCH AND FRENCH

text André Gregory and Wallace Shawn after the screenplay of the Louis Malle film with the same title
adaptation Damiaan De Schrijver and Peter Van den Eede
a performance by and with Damiaan De Schrijver and Peter Van den Eede

French translation Martine Bom
costumes Inge Büscher

production tg STAN and De KOE
coproducers of the French version Théâtre Garonne (Toulouse), Théâtre de la Bastille and Festival d'Automne (Paris)

premiere 17 September 1998, Toneelhuis, Antwerp
premiere French version 11 October 2005, Théâtre Garonne, Toulouse

The performance is dedicated to Yolande Lippens and Laurent Hubrecht.

Yes.
You know,
in the sexual act there's that moment of complete forgetting
which is so incredible,
and in the next moment you start to think about things –
work on the play, what you've got to do tomorrow.
I think it must be quite common.
The world comes in quite fast.
Now, that may be because we don't have the courage
to stay in that place of forgetting,
because that is again close to death.
Like people who are afraid to go to sleep.
In other words, you interrelate,
and you don't know what the next moment will bring.
And to not know what the next moment will bring,
I think,
brings you closer to a perception of death.
So that, paradoxically,
the closer you get to living,
in the sense of relating constantly,
I guess the closer you get to this thing that we're most afraid of.


In My Dinner with André (1998, in Dutch), after the screenplay of the Louis Malle film with the same name, Damiaan De Schrijver and Peter Van den Eede eat a four-course dinner cooked live on stage every night by a different cook, while having an - at times hilarious - conversation about life and the theatre.

Since its creation in 1998 this production toured extensively in Flanders and the Netherlands. In 1999 it was awarded First Prize at the Theaterfestival and nominated for the Océ Podium Prize.

The French version was premiered at the end of October 2005 in Toulouse (Théâtre Garonne).