‘VERHALTENSMUSTER’ confronts audiences with visceral unease

VERHALTENSMUSTER forces its audience into an intimacy they can’t look away from.

Written, directed, and produced by Nic Lindegger, ArtSci ’26, this show is an experimental piece of theatre staged in the Tett Centre’s gallery from Nov. 22 to 25.

Walking into space felt like stepping into someone else’s nightmare. Before the show even begins, three women—Alina Siwy, ArtSci ‘27, Sophie Wilson and Zoe Compson, both ArtSci ’26—wearing white hospital gowns sit motionless in the centre of the room. As audience members take their seats, the performers twitch and mutter, crafting an atmosphere already thick with discomfort—a tension that only tightens as the show unfolds.

The show follows the three women trapped in what appears to be a psychiatric room, with plot being secondary to sensation; the performance is built from jagged, repetitive dialogue and intense physicality. The actors run, thrash, crawl, and convulse through the space, often resembling wounded animals as they navigate their environment.

For Lindegger, physical unease is the thematic core. “I struggled a lot growing up, and I still do with just feeling uncomfortable in the physical autonomy of my body,” they said in an interview with The Journal. Their goal was to “stage this uncomfortability with the physical body in the world of theatre,” creating uncertainty around what’s real or simulated.

That uncertainty hits the audience directly. Props are hidden beneath seats, forcing actors to crawl under audience members to retrieve them. Even knowing it was coming didn’t prepare me for the shock of a performer scuttling toward me and reaching under my chair for a box of matches. The performers routinely invade the audience’s space, staring from mere inches away or making comments about specific spectators’ posture and facial expressions.

Lindegger wanted to provoke this visceral response. “I’m hoping that the audience feels uncomfortable in their seats,” they said. “We don’t really see that a lot in the theatre. I really wanted to try pushing for a different aspect.”

The production evolved significantly during rehearsals, and Lindegger described the difficulty of shifting from writer to director: “I think the hardest thing was allowing myself to make cuts to my own script.” The show changed up until opening night. “I cut a line two and a half hours before the show opened because it just wasn’t working.”

Despite, or because of, its unpredictability, the show succeeds in its mission. Watching VERHALTENSMUSTER was, at times, overwhelming. I couldn’t wait for it to end, and yet I loved every unsettling moment. As the show concluded and the actors’ broke character to take their bows, the audience let out a collective sigh of relief. The show lingers in the body long after leaving the theatre, fulfilling Lindegger’s ambition to generate discomfort that feels disturbingly real.

VERHALTENSMUSTER doesn’t seek to soothe. It confronts and destabilizes, reminding its audience that unease can be one of theatre’s most powerful tools.