Topical again, now that Toneelgroep Amsterdam is reviving the play, my review from 2014. This week, the stage adaptation of The Fountainhead premiered. The book is terrible, the performance rattles, the actors win only narrowly. The content, however, creates even more confusion, which is why I won't stop you from going to see it. And Hans Kesting, of course. I put it this way.
[Tweet "1: The Fountainhead remains made of granite"]
I couldn't get through the first 100 pages of The Fountainhead. And there are more than 700 of them. Ayn Rand writes about scary big characters, caricatures who don't so much struggle with, as stand for, big ideas and therefore all rise two metres above the rabble. In the stage version, the dialogues have been boned down to just those Big Sentences. This gives the performance something adolescent. Despite the acting of Ramsey Nasr as Roark and Halina Reijn as the self-destructive eternal lover Dominique, who do their best to make people out of Ayn Rands Great Examples.
[Tweet "2: The Fountainhead is artistic self-gratification"]
Artists making pieces about artists suffering from their uncompromising pursuit of the higher, while the world around them gets bogged down in slackness and scheming. It runs in the best families. Shakespeare did it in Hamlet, Molière in The Human Hater and Chekhov in A Seagull. It is beautiful when such luminaries do it. Puberty when lesser gods try. Ayn Rand is a lesser artist. But again, the actors can't help that.
[Tweet "3: There is a Howard Roark in everyone. #Fountainhead”]
The appeal of Ayn Rand's work is clear. Her plea for uncompromising selfishness, against all odds, is something we all share deep in our hearts. That the alternative is dirty and sordid, as communism or fascism masquerading as civility and charity, comes across as somewhat less appealing on reflection. Where in this ideological debate the makers of the stage version find themselves is not entirely clear. It seems as if they are mainly confining themselves to art, and relegating the social consequences of Rands ideology to second place: an ideal society made up of creative rulers and a rabble of 'second-handers, extortionists and parasites'. But is that possible? Surely we are now groaning under a regime that almost says that poverty is a choice and illness is one's own responsibility?
[Tweet "4: The world hangs together from clichés in The Fountainhead."]
Great men fall deep, the good wife is always replaced by the fatal mistress and the cool woman always falls for the rough bonk, but will then opt for the money. The language of the Bouquet series was no stranger to Ayn Rand. Indeed, her work is pretty much considered the textbook example of 20th-century penny novels. In the - even more condensed - stage version, you can see every twist and turn coming well in advance. For four hours.
[Tweet "5: Architects don't have sex. #Fountainhead”]
The world Dominique (Halina Reijn) is growing up in is a world of architects, and as everyone knows, have architects no sex. They are widely regarded as the dullest kind of human being in existence. So the fact that Howard Roark (Ramsey Nasr) is an architect is highly implausible. Because he has sex. And how. Dominique invariably cums within the minute. Quite a feat. For an architect.
[Tweet "6: When all seems lost, in comes the cavalry. #Fountainhead”]
So after the first fat two hours of adolescent big idea theatre, you yearn for something tangible, something real, something you can connect with as a human being. And let Toneelgroep Amsterdam have something special for that. His name is Hans Kesting and when he speaks, it says something, and when he breaks, something cracks. Without Hans Kesting as a saviour after the break, Toneelgroep Amsterdam's already not undeserving strikers would not have made it to the next round.
[Tweet "7: To watch or not to watch? Let your prefrontal cortex decide. #Fountainhead”]
The boundless, libertine egoism promoted by Ayn Rand finds its best effect among adolescents, and - strangely enough - among people in groups. Social awareness, altruism, self-reflection stand in the way of uncompromising egoism, and what Ayn Rand did not know, and we do, is that social awareness, altruism and self-reflection are the result of a well-developed prefrontal cortex. The adolescent brain does not have that, and that is what makes adolescents so attractively selfish, indestructible and immortal. Recent research has shown that the prefrontal cortex is also switched off when we act in a group. This is what makes football supporters, women at a tea party and ISIS fighters likewise so attractively selfish, indestructible and immortal. Wonder what Ayn Rand would think about that.
But it is nice that a performance manages to release all those kinds of thoughts. So go there, think for yourself, but above all talk to your neighbours about it. You need them.
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You just have to dare: characterise the author of a play, which is still being performed more than 60 years after its creation because the subject matter is apparently timeless, as "a lesser artist" and "the textbook example of penny novels". That kind of disparaging muscle language may be a (misunderstood) attempt at humour, but it mostly shows misplaced arrogance.
Indeed, for a serious review of the play, it is better to look elsewhere.
It is clear that this reviewer dislikes Ayn Rand quite a bit. It also becomes clear that this reviewer does not have the capacity to understand anything about thought.
Too bad, for those interested, I refer to other reviews, which can better articulate what the essence of the play is all about.
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