Audience put in their place

Although both performances were created in very different ways, parallels can be drawn between 'Romeo and Juliet. To Romeo and Juliet‘ by Karina Kroft and 'Crastest Ibsen II - People's Enemy' by Sarah Moeremans / Noord Nederlands Toneel. Director Karina Kroft and actor Joep van der Geest in conversation about their relationship with a classic play and their audience.

Director Karina Kroft began by weaving together the texts of Shakespeare and Handke. She wanted to Romeo and Juliet combine with Publikumsbeschimpfung, a classic she hands out by default as soon as she starts working with new actors. "I want actors to realise as soon as possible that the audience exists, that that stand is not a unfathomable depth," she says. In the show, we see six actresses regularly stepping out of the play to address their audience. "I rehearse very searchingly and intuitively, because playing is often about yourself. In this performance, own texts from those rehearsals are woven through the classic. The actresses all play Romeo and Juliet and each does so in their own way. For instance, when actress Lauretta van de Merwe plays Juliet, she is so afraid of living from the start that she would rather die. While Stacyian Jackson's Juliet, on the other hand, is naive and cheerful in life."

Working on Crash test Ibsen II - People's Enemy started very differently for Van der Geest. From Ibsen's existing text, a completely new one was written by Joachim Robbrecht at the behest of Sarah Moeremans. "In our series Crash tests we take a closer look at Ibsen's society dramas. These are plays in which he wants to denounce a certain section of society. In the series, in a thought experiment, we take a closer look at precisely those morals again and compare them with the morals prevailing today. At enemy of the people that we are playing now, Ibsen wants to say that idealism loses out to pragmatism and the press is hypocritical. That was revolutionary then."

"But how can you proclaim a morality from 1882 now? We do that in images, for example, by all wearing beards, which always mean something different in history. In the 1960s, a beard was a sign of counterculture, now it's hipsters wearing beards and in Ibsen's time it was a sign of stature."

The characters on stage are constantly aware of their museality. Consequently, the play plays on three levels all the time:

"I'm defending the interests of a mayor in a Norwegian provincial town, the second layer is that of the actor who has trouble with that performance, I say, for example, that I don't feel like spending the whole evening trying to shake off that image of an evil politician, and the third layer is testing the morality Ibsen wanted to proclaim with the audience at that moment. So for that, the 4th wall has to be broken through.

The public does at Crash test II service as 'the vast majority'. Kroft agrees; a performance is not a performance if there is no audience. "My performances are therefore as much about the audience as they are about the actors," he says. "And it makes quite a difference whether you play for NS employees or a room full of children," Van der Geest knows. The Oerol audience is in a class of its own according to Kroft: "Oerol audiences are very sweet and willing, they are even willing to hold umbrellas over the actors in the rain."

Yet Van der Geest also gets a bit sad that for two weeks theatre is pretended to be the pinnacle and the rest of the year the halls are empty. "For example, I saw a tweet pass by someone who thought NNT had shown that text theatre is not boring. It's terrible that that prejudice lives on, isn't it? While there is nothing more beautiful than a theatrical text," Van der Geest thinks. "The richness of theatre literature is improbable. But in itself such a text is nothing, a piece only exists when it is played." "That's all that matters, those hour and a half on the floor," Kroft agrees. Van der Geest even says: "a text like that only consists of letters on paper. Just ink."

Karina Kroft i.c.w. Amsterdam School of Drama & Contemporary Music - Romeo and Juliet. To Romeo and Juliet 13 to 22 June, 16:00 and 19:00, Oerol festival

NNT/Sarah Moeremans - Crashtest Ibsen II - People's Enemy 13 to 21 June, 10pm, Oerol festival