Last year, theatre festival Boulevard ran a competition giving young creators the chance to create a performance. Requirements: the target audience (young people aged six and over), the length of the performance (roughly 20 minutes) and the theme (Vincent Van Gogh). This weekend the first two winners could be seen, next weekend the other two. Above all, the first performances showed the two faces of youth theatre.
Goodbye Van Gogh by Puppet Theatre Irene Laros is lovingly and subtly created with beautiful effects and ingenious puppets made of cardboard. The audience is gently taken into a day like any other, but through the eyes of Vincent van Gogh. Projections of famous paintings, including the famous bedroom, come to life, birdsong is heard and we feel a breeze. A skeleton as a model and brother Theo rereading a letter are obviously present. But it doesn't sink in.
It results in safe Sunday afternoon youth theatre, averse to adventure. Voiceovers and bland skeleton word jokes then kill it. No sunflower can make it exciting then, not for children, not for their parents.
But then Verfie From DefDef. Maniacal. Driven. Dangerous. Seductive. Yes, here also the sunflowers, several even. Meant for a machine with only one purpose: to make unique art and its inventor rich and famous. Devil artist Jelle de Wit plays the audience and puts everyone on the wrong foot. No little voices here, but raised voices, tantrums, laughter. And then ask a single child, "What are you laughing at?", followed by a tirade.
Parents think: is he just chaffing that kid in the front row now? Is it really necessary now that he not only requires child labour for his machine, but immediately adds Primark and Nike? Yep, and we get the children's hourly wages as well. And immediately the twist: "Because that's what they like, children, working. Sixteen hours a day."
Should we laugh or cry?
But no time to think about that as we see 'no ordinary theatre where we spend hours working towards a dramatic climax while the audience is bored', but location theatre at lightning speed. So hup! A child from the audience into the infernal machine, along with sunflowers for inspiration. Get to work! Stronger: jumping on the box, stomping hard and shouting "Arbeiten!" shout. Et voila, there a world-famous painting rolls off the belt.
Of course the child escapes moments later, unfortunately with one ear less (no art without sacrifice), and the tormented artist himself is swallowed by the machine. As a final act, the machine spits out another self-portrait of Van Gogh, the ultimate 'verfie'.
The performance is clever, exciting, comical and extremely inventive, even where you don't expect it. Because that machine is hollow inside, duh, how else can you hide a child and - as it turns out later - a technician in it? Afterwards, the technician explains to me that the whole machine has been constructed in such a way that a music box that is normally barely audible once on the machine sounds loud and clear in the entire Statenzaal, 'like the sound box of a guitar'.
Verfie is full of such finds and double entendres. Judging by the reactions of the children in particular afterwards, it is clear that this is where the future of youth theatre lies.
Seen at Theatre Festival Boulevard
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
I had the feeling that it was mainly the parents who found the ranting Belgian hilarious; the children were just uncomfortable. In Dag Van Gogh, they wanted nothing more than to sit on the butterflies, looked at the puppets in amazement and did indeed learn something about van Gogh. So I think this performance would have been more successful as 'youth' theatre.
True, the children were seemingly uncomfortable at times (although I saw them laughing a lot). But that is also part of theatre, even for toddlers. In fact: afterwards, the children I asked unanimously thought Verfie was more fun and exciting, for that very reason.
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