Luk Perceval stripped the book of its Amsterdam and early-1970s context. Only the very core remained: a woman who can’t commit because the realization of decay hangs around her life like a veil. A man who can’t save her because he unjustly interprets her cry for love as a rejection.

The year of cancer (Het jaar van de kreeft) is about a troublesome relationship. The performance is a sequence of absurd, tragicomic and physically exhausting scenes between two desperate people who can neither live with nor without each other. Both lovers are caught in an inescapable spiral of intimacy and detachment, pride and devotion, life and death. A story without romance, about two people who experience love as a fate and a mission.

Claus’s novel is a rollercoaster. In short chapters, he draws a portrait of two people who can neither live with nor without each other. In provocative, moving and poetic scenes, we witness the distress caused by a great passion. Claus succeeds in turning a story that would have generated a very bad novel in the hands of lesser authors into an existential drama about angst and a drive towards death. Balancing between pathos and humor, he creates two unforgettable characters in a love story that makes sense in all ages.


In a physically exhausting performance, Maria Kraakman and Gijs Scholten van Aschat play and dance the ecstasy of being in love, as well as the defensive fights after the breakup. The forced nature of the relationship echoes in the piano music, composed and performed live by Jeroen van Veen. It propels the two lovers in a danse macabre towards the conclusion, where neither of them is willing to definitively herald the end.