Connoisseurs know: often actors spend two months rehearsing a play with only one goal in mind: to recover the freshness and surprise of the 'first reading'. After all, at that first reading, actors hear the text for the first time from their colleagues, read the words aloud for the first time, and everything sounds new and unexpected. The phase after that is often quite tedious. At least for outsiders: rehearsal is really not fun to watch.
Toneelgroep Amsterdam will now attempt to perform that 'first reading' for a slightly larger audience. Fred Goessens, Janni Goslinga, Hans Kesting, Chris Nietvelt, Alwin Pulinckx, Eelco Smits and Leon Voorberg will then read - hopefully totally unprepared - the text 'Exorcism' by Eugene O'Neill, an American writer who lived from 1888 to 1953 and who left us such plays as Rijkemanshuis and Rouw Siert Electra. Exorcism was his first play, a short one, and O'Neill destroyed it shortly after its premiere in 1919. Thoroughly destroyed, because no copy of the play could be found until a few years ago.
But now that copy is there, and so this rough and polished debut is brought brand new by some of Holland's best actors. You can go watch and listen, to hear whether O'Neill was right to destroy the play, or whether it is indeed as it is with many firsts: that he has spent the rest of his career trying to recover the power and surprise of that first time.
Sun 1 April | 15:00 | € 12.50 / € 10.00 | stadsschouwburg amsterdam | (020) 624 23 11 |. ssba.co.uk | tga.co.uk
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