THE HOE - The Sitcom

The theater hit from 2025 is back! Eight years ago, a theater collective made a legendary sitcom, with an equally legendary open ending. Now the group of friends is coming together again to knit a sequel to their cult hit with none other than Wim Helsen in the role of guest actor! ‘DE SITCOM’ is a schizophrenic tragicomedy in which actors play their own tragic lives, but as a joke. It is also the making-of that sitcom, including the loves, the breakups, the distrust, the cautious attempts at reconciliation, the betrayal, and the hope, always, for a happy ending after all. "DE HOE shows itself masterfully funny again in its self-irony. You have to do it: dress up a philosophical treatise on flatness and humor as a perfectly accessible comedy, a contemporary Anton Tsjechov. Opening Night, the first major performance by DE HOE, was already something to lick your fingers at, but this successor surpasses that even: as subtle as it is ostentatious, as witty as it is sad." - Wouter Hillaert in De Standaard ★★★★★ "In an organized chaos, the inspired cast oscillates with a lot of humor and self-mockery between TV and theater, superficiality and depth, comedy and tragedy, reality and fiction, young and old. (...) Seemingly non-committal, but very thoughtful scenes expose a society that loses itself in trivialities. It results in an enriching ‘cut’ performance that you laugh heartily at, but also can't stop talking about." - Guy Van Vliet in Het Nieuwsblad ★★★★ "Ultimately, you never know for sure in which reality a scene is located. Only when you let that go, when you stop zooming out and interpreting, and instead accept the situation again and again in the moment, do the characters gain depth. Then you suddenly see a group of struggling people, fighting their transience. But letting go is difficult, and that is precisely where DE SITCOM touches the core: our far-reaching obsession with authenticity more often than not deprives us of the view of the actual drama around us." - Sander Janssens in de Volkskrant ★★★★ "Does it sound inimitable? It is a bit. And yet the idiosyncratic company succeeds in making a layered performance about our desire to be seen and unfulfilled desires." - Lorianne van Gelder in Het Parool "Even when DE HOE makes an entire performance about superficiality (perhaps even especially when), the company elevates complexity to absolute art. It never becomes just a trick, it is never merely spielerei; you are played out of context elegantly and technically ingeniously, because that, it dawns on you in the long run, is the only way to reach the existential goal of DE HOE: to contain one's own time without meanwhile perishing in it yourself." - Floris Baeke in Etcetera "An outrageously smart and mercilessly witty performance, in which the sitcom genre is filleted to the bone." - Gina Miroula in Theaterkrant "Everything in this production borders on perfection. The acting performances strike you dumb." - Karl van den Broeck in Apache