We talk endlessly about climate change and then the lights go out. #decision

It is the most frequently asked question to actresses: whether that is difficult, crying on command. And invariably Carice van Houten or Halina Reijn then to Matthijs van Nieuwkerk or Jeroen Pauw that there are all kinds of tricks for that. For crying. Just thinking of something nasty, tiger balm, onions, and Vaseline. Now, however, it turns out there is something where even all those technical means cannot make you cry, no matter how much you would like to, or how necessary it might be: a climate summit.

In her solo performance 'Cry me A River', Austrian actress Anna Mendelssohn tries to cry for an hour while reenacting an entire climate summit on her own in fluent English. Not that she can't cry: she once cried for days over the melting ice in Greenland and later also had to cry every time she visited her psychotherapist. But then it was about herself. Surely that climate is something else. This fresh-faced thirty-something with her infectious looks should cry about it, but so it doesn't. Not even if you play sentimental music to go with it.

It's an interesting statement Mendelssohn makes, but the execution could be better. However nicely she demonstrates, for instance by painting herself a skin disease, that the world is dying while we all talk endlessly, if you show that something does not touch, it therefore does not touch the viewer either.

Mendelssohn's theatre comes a little close to that of Laura van Dolron's stand-up philosophy. But this performance just lacks Van Dolron's genius, because nowhere does it have a stuck-out leg or left-hand direct lurking. If you are not floored once in a while, as frequently happens to the audience with Van Dolron, you don't take home much else from the performance either. So too with Mendelssohn: she tells us that it is impossible to be truly touched by something as grand as climate change and that it will remain so until the lights go out. And so then the light goes out at the end. Nice find, but also one that leaves you otherwise cold.

Which, with the increasing heat on our planet, is convenient.

The show was seen on September 22 and can still be seen on September 23, 2011. Information.