4 ways to quiet a room: Jelinek strikes at Holland Festival

This year's trip will go to India and Nepal. Because that seemed nice to him. Visitors to the Dutch premiere of Jelinek's Die Schutzbefohlene were looking forward to the summer. Next year they would visit a friend in Vietnam. Little hassle to get a visa. As a white European, the whole world is yours. You can go anywhere. The man did not realise how privileged he was.

Then the hall lights went out and suddenly there were all these people on stage without visas or residence permits. Real illegal immigrants who could just be caught for real. Real people without real residence permits. And they demanded a place. Because the right to shelter is a universal human right. It got quiet in the room very quickly.

I can think of a few more reasons why.

1: Get us where it hurts.

Die Schutzbefohlene is an adaptation by Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek of the 2,500-year-old Greek drama The Beggars. It is indeed about people who come to ask for shelter while fleeing violence and receive zero response. The texts did not need to be updated, but a few images of boat refugees near Lampedusa, covers of IND leaflets incomprehensible to foreigners, and you have the thoughts going. About the children born here we deport. About the racism that has so imperceptibly seeped into all our actions.

2: Force respect

There are professional actors on stage, but so are several dozen real refugees, whom they have not brought with them from Germany (because that is not allowed), but who are in Amsterdam. And so those actors create a fresh distance, because they are also Germans with their intellectual theatre and their beautiful language, written by a real Nobel Prize winner. So those refugees are downright amateurs. But how calmly, confidently and with such self-respect they do it that it becomes uncomfortable.

3: Stir a little deeper into the wound

That it must therefore be Germans who come and beat us over the head with a piece written for Germany by an Austrian about our closed borders, our rock-hard stance against foreigners, our black-pepper discussion and our irrational fear of being overrun by wild hordes from Africa and Arabia. We used to make pieces about the Germans and Austrians who were so much worse than us. Now they are doing it to us. That hurts.

4: Offer an option to buy it off.

The refugees all belong to the group 'We are here' which was first in a refugee church and has now found shelter in a prison. On Friday, 13 June, they have to leave there. For the umpteenth time, they are homeless. The German actors asked us, the audience, to give generously at the collection afterwards. I had no money with me, but it would have been a hair's breadth away if I had cleared a room in my house. Anyway, the boxes and dresses for the collection afterwards were quite full of paper money, in not even the smallest denominations. Here a terribly deep and justified guilt was redeemed.

That way, drama can still get something done.

Still to be seen on Wednesday 11 and Friday 13 June. Information.