"The substantive terror of THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER"

Marie-Aude Roux | Le Monde, 08.07.13

(...) The quality (of THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER) relies firstly on the excellent libretto british playwright Sam Holcroft has created from Julio Cortazar's novel (...), a disturbing huis-clos somewhere between Poe and Ibsen. A brother and sister - Hector and Rosa - live isolated in their family home. Terrifying noises are heard, which require them to take refuge in increasingly cramped rooms, only to find themselves in the threshold of the house. They will have to choose: stay and die in an asthenia of their living space or leave and finally face life. Katie Mitchell´s sophisticated and literal staging, with its doll house set, observes the obsessive rigor of domestic rituals, the clinical movement of bodies, the objects in a sort of mechanical ballet (...) Written for a chamber ensemble (thirteen instruments), Vasco Mendonça´s elegant score seems to reproduce the strangulation of the space on stage. Allusive or repetitive forms, dark coloured continuums, passages of lethal harmonies, all are in agreement with the confinement ceremony. But structure escapades, a sometimes very free lyricism, and unusual sounds such as those of the melodicas (...) talk of a possible elsewhere. In a remarkable interpretation from beginning to end in the pit or on stage, musicians and singers have defended with rare commitment this music of substantive terror.