A man, a woman and a girl share a house. The man spends his days in a company’s ice cellar. To kill time, he collects newspaper cuttings of all kinds of gruesome events. In the meantime, his hyperactive wife loses herself in organising the household and making children’s clothes that she sells through her brother-in-law. The housemaid who assists her is the focus of the man’s desires. In Menuet, this classic triangular relationship unfolds into a grand tragedy on a domestic scale.

The LOD composer Daan Janssens and director Fabrice Murgia are tackling the existential issues in Louis Paul Boon’s 1955 novel. The simple facts are presented three times in succession, each time through the eyes of one of the characters. This gives the banal situation a tragic depth. Solitude, shame and sexual desire are the basis for this 3D vision of man shown here. Menuet sketches a portrait of lonely people who hover between the normal and the abnormal, between speaking and silence. Daan Janssens and Fabrice Murgia go in search of this tension in the conviction that real life lies in this in-between zone.

The Ghent production house LOD conquered our hearts long ago and that love continues. For 25 years they have been creating leading musical theatre and operatic performances with a range of theatre directors, including Josse de Pauw and Guy Cassiers. The LOD artists are praised both nationally and internationally for their contemporary approach to the genre and have received various prestigious awards for this.