How do you make theatre with someone who speaks a different language? The Volksoperahuis does. Hot Pepper is already the third performance Kees Scholten and Jef Hofmeister are making with artists from the former Dutch colonies. After Willemstad and Paramaribo, they now travelled to Yogyakarta. They came home with a hushed, elegantly designed narrative about the shared past - and how stories about it still contradict each other.
After the Japanese occupation, the Dutch were expelled from their victorious territory. The Indonesian struggle for independence was chaotic and brutal. People became disconnected from each other and the country they had grown up in. Hot Pepper is about two men, a Dutchman and a Javanese, and the woman who loved them both. When they came face to face, she was killed in the crossfire.
Now she is a phantom who visits the men in their dreams. And shadows, they are good at that at Papermoon Puppet Theatre, the partner of the Volksoperahuis in Jogya. Papermoon, which built an international reputation with playful variations on traditional wayang, now shares the floor with Scholten and Hofmeister's Dutch craftsmanship, which is equally sophisticated but more robust. Two spoken languages, two styles of music, two theatrical languages and two versions of the painful memory of a love that did not survive the war. Not closing that gap, showing the differences but not bridging them, is what makes the performance honest and beautiful.
Beautiful is the little Javanese grandfather. On the canvas, we see the shadow of the boy in love he once was. On the floor he shuffles to emerge at the beginning of the performance: the morning is slow in coming, he smokes his first cigarette, sweeps the floor, builds his work stall along the street - with a wonderfully expressive but modelled head and limbs of wood. He is propelled so quietly by the young puppeteer Beni Sanjaya that you gradually almost forget the difference between him and the real people around him, for whom he is the only one who can still tell them exactly how it went then, with that fatal love story.
By chance, I was in Yogyakarta myself when Volksoperahuis and Papermoon were in the middle of rehearsals there. In a studio with all the windows and doors open, in a courtyard filled with the smells and sounds of the stoking city, I saw an early run-through of the performance. The story was more or less ready. Jef Hofmeister had written a few songs. Kees Scholten was playing and directing at the same time, constantly talking to co-director Maria Tri Sulistyani. Grandpa had just been built. Of puppeteer Sekar Rahina, no one knew if she could also play well in front of the stage. Speaking on stage she had never done.
It was a fascinating spectacle. Back and forth, everyone was extremely polite, wary not to step on cultural toes, amiable at work but also tense: this had to be good. When you take on such a cultural leap, it cannot be allowed to fail.
And good it got. The atmosphere of that courtyard in Jogya is immediately palpable in the melodious slowness of the opening scene. Sekar is a revelation as the granddaughter: she keeps grandpa loving company, she answers the curious questions of the Dutchman who comes to find out what happened then, she is the infatuated, seductively dancing girl in the hours before she is shot. Kees Scholten switches from cautious colonialist's son to a defiant Poncke Princen. Jef Hofmeister and Mo-ong Sandi build a live soundtrack that gently sways and smoothly rocks. The whole performance has the quiet concentration of searching for the painful secret that has been obscured by incomplete, unspoken memories for 70 years, the secret of the break with colonialism and the lives lost in the process. One language had never been enough to approach that secret.
Photo: Jochem Jurgens
Seen on 2 April, Schouwburg het Park, Hoorn
Still on view until 25 April
See http://het.volksoperahuis.nl/hete-peper
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