There will be another Bambierambam. Every few years, the two core members of theatre group Bambie (Jochem Stavenuiter and Paul van der Laan) and guest actors move into a theatre in the Netherlands for a few days to re-enact some old shows.
This makes Bambie one of the groups whose productions, with original cast, hold the longest repertoire. Some performances are more than a decade old. Are they not losing their topicality? And what is it like for the actors, who are now busy with all kinds of other theatre work, to play the productions again?
"It's fun doing them again anyway," says Jochem Stavenuiter. ,,It's different from then, but yet not really. When making a new show, we started working with our guest actors from a basic idea, which Paul or I suggested. All the thought steps that followed led to the final performance. Now that we are repeating those pieces, we end up in those same steps. Sometimes we question them and change something. But as we go along, we always end up with what we had thought of then."
,,What has really changed is the energy we used then to get the play across the limelight. We notice now that those pieces were made by a younger body and a younger head. The thought jumps were different then. And physically, we just notice that we are not in the same condition as we were then. Yet this is not what the effect of the performance depends on. What we have more of now than before is: nuance and precision. We have developed more ways of expressing ourselves. A small gesture now works much more strongly than the grand gesture of the past. We use our energy more efficiently."
Bambie has always strived to address universal topics. For most of the performances, including those now on show at Bambierambam, the topical value still stands.
,,Bambie 7 is about the refugee issue. If we had made that show now, we would have worked it out differently. We would have done something with a boat and water. But in 2001, we chose as a given: stuff people take with them when they have to flee. One of our images in Bambie 7 is that one of the characters has seven layers of clothes on top of each other, taken off one by one. The idea came from Anne Frank's diary. She describes her departure to the Secret Annex, to go into hiding. Suitcases were not allowed to be taken, because otherwise they would be noticed. That's why she had put on all her nice clothes on top of each other. She was all fat and round and even thought that was funny. We gave that image our own twist. Apart from being a method of taking lots of clothes, it is an image for something being peeled off, like the layers of an onion. And that in turn represents slowly peeling off layers to the core of being human."
Another non-time-related theme is found in the 13th performance, Bambie Treize. ,,This one is about nostalgia for a time you never lived in yourself, like you can have when you see old films. The film noir inspired us. Such a film gives you the feeling of the certainty of the known. Underneath it lies a deeper longing: that you would actually like to be someone else than you are."
Bambie's sixteenth performance, Bambie F-16, is about world leaders, or rather dictators. The show is exceptional because, according to Jochem Stavenuiter, it is more cartoonish than the others. ,,When we Bambie F-16 were going to make, I suggested that each take a real world leader as an example and make his own using biographies. But Martin Hofstra, who also participated, said he could not possibly put himself in a dictator's shoes and could only see such a person from a distance, from a binocular perspective. He was right about that. We made the performance at the time Gaddafi was toppling. We saw documentaries and read about him and other dictators in the newspapers. They remained figures far away. So we prepared with behavioural observation rather than trying to empathise with the dictator's psychology. We gave it a subtitle: Pursuit ballet for world leaders. It became a kind of Tom-and-Jerry choreography, a performance parodying dictators from a Dutch point of view. If we had been in the middle of an authoritarian-ruled country, we would have made a very different performance. I did go to Tahrir Square in Cairo and soaked up a bit of the revolution in Egypt. But the revolution there still remained something I saw from a distance. I realised that what we do here in the theatre means absolutely nothing to dictators themselves."
Bambie 14 is about passion, about love and love crimes, another theme that never ceases to be topical. Jochem and Paul got hold of a book describing crimes of passion, case studies for the police. The book dates from the 1930s, contains black-and-white photographs of crime scenes and is written in a pre-war style. ''The crazy thing is: those black-and-white photos make you look at them very differently. They take on a kind of beauty. When you see contemporary photos of murders, they are in colour and you are overwhelmed by the ferocity of them. But those old photographs and the old-fashioned texts reveal the ridiculousness of how people thought about such things back then. This is precisely how we touch on the universal of the theme of 'jealousy', of the despair that is often behind such events."
On the first evening of Bambierambam is The Big Book of Bambi presented, a 250-page book full of colour photos and background texts about the performances Bambie has made from the start. The book is on sale on site for a discounted price of €19 instead of €24.50.
Bambierambam at Frascati, Amsterdam:
Thu 5 Feb
19.00: presentation of The Great Book of Bambi
20.30 u.: Bambie F-16
Fri 6 Feb
20.30 u.: Bambie 14
22.30 u.: Bambie 7
Sat 7 Feb
20.00 u.: Bambie 8
22.00 u.: Bambie Treize
English (UK) 
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