#HF11: They're going to make another big cut to the Russians at Toneelgroep Amsterdam

Cologne and Paris may not have been built in a day, but it took less than three days to fly to the moon. A warped comparison to say that a show that rattles three days before its premiere can turn out to be an unimaginable hit on the premiere itself. So such a thing can happen to The Russians, the latest show from Toneelgroep Amsterdam. Star director Ivo van Hove asked star author Tom Lanoye to an adaptation of two plays by Anton Chekhov. So Lanoye mixed the loser Ivanov with the Don Juan Platonov and star DJ Tom Holkenborg, aka Junkie XL, a hallucinatory soundscape underneath, while designer Jan Versweyveld's 'urban' set is illuminated by brilliant projections. On stage now, all the stars of Toneelgroep Amsterdam, and thus of Dutch theatre, are playing the stars of heaven in a show that thus looks and sounds beautiful.

But it still didn't run smoothly, and that was mainly in the text. At least three days before the premiere, Lanoye's adaptation still comes across too much as a modern retelling, but not as extreme as he did earlier with Ten Oorlog, the play in which he forged six Shakespearean plays into a 12-hour monument to language, Shakespeare and, above all, actor Jan Decleir.

Now the editing is too visible, the scenes in which the characters from the two plays encounter each other are too contrived and it still doesn't want to become much with the destiny connection between Platonov and Ivanov, however fantastic Fedja van Huet and Jacob Derwig also counteract each other in those roles.

Knowing Ivo van Hove, things will turn out all right: we are betting on a performance that will last not six-and-a-half, but five hours, and expect that especially the last part of the current adaptation will be heavily cut, however painful that may be for Lanoye. But twenty endings we thought was a bit much, at midnight.

Enfin. Making big cuts in their own work is something they do well on stage. Too bad, though, that they have also adopted that in political The Hague. We have some footage of that too.