War and Turpentine as part of the Malta Festival

It was a story about war, art, and humanity — woven from memory and emotion. The stage adaptation of Stefan Hertmans’s novel revealed a family portrait inscribed in diaries that became a key to understanding the 20th century.

Based on Hertmans’s acclaimed novel War and Turpentine, the performance became both an intimate and epic journey through the life of the author’s grandfather, an amateur painter and frontline soldier during the First World War. Hertmans grounded his narrative in personal experience, drawing on the diaries he received shortly before his grandfather’s death. These writings became the foundation of a theatrical retelling, in which Jan Lauwers shaped his own vision of the story — one marked by love, sorrow, violence, and the industrialization of the world.

The performance intertwined documentary precision with the poetic language of theatre. Through its subtle balance between narrative and imagery, audiences were drawn into an emotional landscape of the past that resonated with the present. It was a reflection on inherited trauma, the power of memory, and the need to understand personal history in a collective context.