DE SITCOM

It has been eight years since the success of the legendary sitcom THE SITCOM, created and performed by a theatre collective on the brink of financial ruin. Without a budget, just a real group of friends in a real coffee shop. A tv series which was so rare, authentic and radical, so hilarious and disturbing, so deeply human and so tragic, that it instantly became a cult hit. But to the surprise of the series’ growing fan base, the series had a gaping open ending. Real life had mercilessly caught up with fiction.Eight years later, sitcoms are considered retro, a genre from a time when we were still closer to laughter than to tears. Nostalgia has become a viable source of income, so the producers bring the group back together. How have they been? Can they continue together? DE SITCOM is a schizophrenic tragicomedy where actors with a tragic life are made to perform their own tragic lives, but as a joke. At the same time, we see the making of the sitcom, including the loves, the breakups, the distrust, the careful attempts at rapprochement, the betrayal, and always the hope that things will turn out alright. Always the hope of a happy ending.DE SITCOM in the press“DE HOE once again proves itself masterfully funny in its self-irony. You have to hand it to them: dressing up a philosophical treatise on banality and humour as a perfectly accessible comedy, a contemporary Anton Chekhov.”Wouter Hillaert in De Standaard, 4 March 2025, ★★★★★“Even when DE HOE creates an entire performance about superficiality (perhaps especially then), the company elevates complexity to an absolute art form. It never becomes a mere trick, never just playful experimentation; you are elegantly and technically skilfully taken apart, because, as you gradually come to realise, this is the only way to reach DE HOE’s existential goal: to grasp the spirit of one’s own time without succumbing to it in the process.”Floris Baeke in Etcetera, 5 March 2025“Successful sitcoms revolve around the recognisability of ‘ordinary’ people, who usually spend endless hours drinking coffee. Theatre, by contrast, often benefits from a degree of alienation, masking and grand gestures. Combine the two and you get an inherently inadequate and unsatisfying framework, and that is precisely what collective DE HOE knows how to work with. Against a backdrop of hilarious confusion, beautiful dramatic motifs and tragic melodic lines gradually emerge.”Sander Janssens in de Volkskrant, 28 April 2025, ★★★★DE HOE receives the Critics’ Prize for its virtuoso series of meta-comedies Watch Wim Helsen’s audition for DE SITCOM