"A house of silence haunted by music"

Jonas Pulver | Le Temps, 11.07.13

A brother, a sister. Already grown up. Their childhood is distant, yet they live in the shadow of the family’s furniture, good as gold, amongst the parental remains of a declining middle class. Their existence is for maintenance, their reason of living is preservation: objects, books, photographs are the sarcophagi of remembrance, the dikes of memory and identity against the backwash of oblivion and independence.

(…) THE HOUSE TAKEN OVER seduces by its fine atmospheres, anxious and oppressive, and by the ambitious interweaving of a hyperrealist and extremely controlled staging, and a music halfway between evocation, figuration and expressionism. (...) the disturbing noises that invade the house, do they exist anywhere but in themselves, beyond their relationship, out of this mould? The vase that brakes, the lamp that falls, are they anything other than the work of their own hands? All the strength of the production is that it leaves this ambiguity unresolved, so we can better hear the music as the vector of (the characters’) inner torments. Yes, in this silent house, the score doesn’t illustrate the apparent action. It haunts the subjective - and thus truly unheard - ties to ordinary objects, through gently mechanized instrumental strata. It speaks, also, of the weight of these material proceedings habit has turned into real characters (…) And then the writing allows a sudden, raw, striking lyricism to emerge. It allows this interstitial space between brother and sister, between their gaze and the creation of their tangible reality, between stage and audience, to be heard. Vasco Mendonça’s music (…) possesses an essential quality in lyric theater: it provides meaning.