100 Dutch plays were presented to them, the 224 Dutch heavy users of our theatre seats who took part in a survey by the Amsterdam Institute for Theatre Studies. Pieces that ranged from fairly well-known, such as Herman Heijermans' 'Op Hoop van Zegen' from the beginning of the last century and Joost van den Vondel's 460-year-old tragedy 'Lucifer', to completely unknown, such as the 1800 play 'Kraspoekel', written by the equally unknown author Dirk van Hogendorp.
In the end, people, who on average go to the theatre between 15 and 25 times a year, preferred Tom Lanoye's 'Ten Oorlog'. This play, which premiered in 1996, is a 12-hour adaptation of many of the British Bard William Shakespeare's royal dramas. Indeed widely rightly hailed as a masterpiece. I can know, I was there. Presumably with some of the other voters, because the Dutch cohort of heavy theatre addicts is not that big.
When asked, one of the authors of the survey, René van Stipriaan, thinks it is a pity that there is still no real Dutch-language playwriting tradition. Plays are often performed only once and then disappear into the closet. At best. More often than not, they are forgotten altogether. The 1990s did see a brief revival of the revival tradition. Hans Croiset - partly inspired by a study I conducted together with Dan Rapaport on the re-staging practice of Dutch-language plays - founded a company specifically dedicated to that re-staging: Het Toneel Speelt.
After that company too was eventually denied a subsidy, the existing Dutch-language theatre repertoire is largely back to square one. New work, creators want, and understandably so. After all, with new work you are always considered brave, so you run less risk. New work is also always current, and there is a lot to be said for that.
The biggest problem, then, is something quite different: the best all-original Dutch play ever, Judith Herzberg's Leedvermaak, was performed 30 times in the Netherlands, around its premiere in 1982. The unfairly forgotten theatre company Baal could not pull out more at the time, in terms of numbers of actors and venues. Playing more was just too expensive.
But since everyone in Amsterdam who had anything to say in the theatre world had already been to one of those 30 performances, they felt that the play did not need to be rerun. It had been seen, on with something new. Thus depriving the then 13 million other potential fans of Holland of the play.
That still happens too often. So it is not that the Netherlands is too small for a thriving playwriting tradition: it is the Amsterdam theatre world that is too small for it. Indeed, in the rest of the country, Dutch repertoire - including material now on the longlist - is played in abundance. By amateurs.
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