Prehistory: the absurd comedy that sends humanity back to the Stone Age

What if the Stone Age were not a distant beginning, but the perfect mirror of our present? That is the premise of Prehistory, a theatre piece set to be performed at Les Riches-Claires in Brussels, where absurdity seems less like a genre than a survival instinct.

The production plays with a familiar Belgian strength: using humour to expose something unsettling beneath the joke. Instead of simply sending audiences back to a prehistoric world, Prehistory seems to ask what remains of us when civilisation, language and social order start to crack.

A Brussels stage fit for it

Les Riches-Claires has long positioned itself as a home for adventurous, offbeat and contemporary work, with a programme that mixes theatre, cabaret and more experimental formats. The venue’s current season page makes clear that it continues to host productions that sit comfortably outside conventional boulevard theatre.

That makes it a fitting home for a piece like Prehistory, which appears to lean into the absurd rather than smooth it out. In Brussels, a show like this is not just entertainment; it is part of a wider tradition of theatre that likes to poke at power, identity and the absurdity of everyday life.

What the play seems to do

Based on the title and the RTBF framing, Prehistory is not a historical reconstruction but a comic displacement: a way of forcing audiences to see modern humanity as primitive, fragile and possibly ridiculous. That kind of reversal often works best on stage, where physical performance, timing and direct audience contact can sharpen the satire.

The result is likely to be less about dinosaurs and caves than about human behaviour, social rituals and the thin line between progress and regression. In other words, the prehistoric setting is a theatrical device — and a very convenient one for making contemporary absurdity look ancient.

Useful link

The show is listed through Les Riches-Claires, whose programming can be found here: Les Riches-Claires – La saison.

For the RTBF article that inspired this piece, see Prehistory, une comédie où l’absurde renvoie l’humanité à l’âge de pierre.

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