Don't Look Now // Estaminet du Théâtre Royal de Toone
This is an except from Pinjtes Vol.1, a zine celebrating Brussels’ café culture by me and Brussels-based illustrator Selkies.
Vol.2 is launching on 28 May in Brussels - details Vol.2 is launching on 28 May in Brussels - details here..
W.H. Auden called the dead end alleyways splayed out from the Grand Place “cold streets tangled like old string”. Sometimes they lead nowhere special, others would put the fear in you, dark and damp and distinctly foreboding. Impasse Schuddeveld does, on the face of it, neither of these things. Any menacing aura the lane might have is undermined by the bright fairy lights the colour of the Italian flag and gaudily painted murals on one wall advertising the Théâtre Royal de Toone a few steps further along the passageway. A cat stands sentry in an alcove near the entrance.
The Toone theatre is a puppet theatre that moonlights as a brown café, a proper Brussels estaminet comprising a warren of dusky rooms succeeding one another through to the back of the building. The theatre has been here since the 1960s, on the floor above the bar, but they have been putting on marionette shows in impenetrable Bruxellois patois for almost 200 years. In the main downstairs room of the café, faded wooden bleachers have been folded away to make room for a jumble of tables and chairs. High up on the wall above them, two over from a royal portrait and longside maudlin portraits of puppets and Toone troupe leaders, is a crude illustration of a girl in a red dress, advertising an old performance of Carmen.
I sit down at the table at the foot of the bleachers at one of the rickety chipped tables, and directly across from me is an old stage, caged behind a cobwebbed chicken wire fence. I feel a cat brush against my leg under the table. Behind the wire cage are a pair of duelling marionettes. Their cheeks are brushed with rouge and they are wearing the tan boots, blue tunic and strident poses of musketeers. One of them, the furthest one, is eyeballing me. He is ventriloquist strange rather than punch grotesque.
Beside them is a prominent sign painted red on white, advertising “spectacle a l’étage”, and three finger posts pointing to the narrow stairway that brings theatre-goers up to the attic. The bar is full of prompts for visitors to move upstairs to take in a show. I have yet to be baited into their trap, and tonight is no different. Don’t look now, but the cat has settled on one of the dusty paisley cushions halfway up the bleachers. It is glaring at me.