Ola Mafaalani and relatability. They don't go together. On Thursday 3 September 2015, the artistic director of the Noord Nederlands Toneel was allowed to open the theatre season with a speech, the State of the Theatre. She did so in a way we could have actually expected from her, but which nevertheless hit like a bomb. It will hopefully be talked about for years to come. Within 'the industry' for sure, hopefully outside it too.
For those who have no idea what this is about: The State of Theatre is the keynote with which the Theatre Festival opens. Every year, this festival showcases the highlights of the previous season and calls for a high-profile person as keynote speaker - or a person of interest, which usually makes for less of a spectacle. So this year it was the turn of Ola Mafaalani, and her speech was both thought-provoking and important, both in form and content.
Deplorable
The content was, in short: the state of Dutch theatre is deplorable, because in the face of a distrustful government, theatre-makers are more concerned with meeting targets, getting applications right and achieving greater efficiency, than with what Mafaalani believes it should be about: the world. And that world, it should be clear, can currently be summed up in that image of that toddler washed ashore, neatly dressed, with his one socked off, dead. Somewhere on the coast of Turkey. We cannot but heartily agree with her.
How playwright Ola Mafaalani conveyed that message was cause for discussion. She began soberly. For her part. Carried, stern, angry, dignified, reproachful, she addressed the room full of guests and interested parties. For many, that was already too much form. For you should know, just as in politics and on TV, in theatre we find too much emphasis on form suspect. If the content is important, you should not underline it further by adopting an interested tone.
Ter Apel
But that worn tone of Mafaalani, with those angrily discarded cheat sheets, was just the beginning. Music came with it. Beautiful music, to be sure, but a speech with music accompanying it, according to many, cannot be. And if that wasn't enough, a black refugee came to stand next to her, and then, slowly but surely, suddenly there were a hundred. In all colours and nationalities currently hoping for a place under our sun. Mafaalani had very Ter Apel put on the stage of Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg, topped off by a little boy in the same clothes as that icon on that Turkish beach.
I couldn't hold it any longer, neither did many people next to me, and afterwards there was a minute-long standing ovation. I clapped for those hundred refugees, to welcome them, helplessly welcome, because I too am still paying the taxes that implement the cold Dutch policy. So it was a guilty applause. With Ola along, not necessarily in favour of Ola.
Yet there were also many who resented it. Who found the applause shocking. Who furiously dismissed the whole spectacle as dangerously manipulative kitsch, who thought - and still think - that Ola Mafaalani is misusing the refugee problem to score cheaply. Or who want to downplay it because, after all, Mafaalani himself once came from Syria, even if it was in a different century, during a different regime, in a different world.
Mafaalani quarter
It is easy to misunderstand: Mafaalani uses all means to emotionalise, and she has mastered that art more and more throughout her career. In the early 1990s, during just such a furious piece of anti-war theatre, I saw everyone in the audience reject her because she had not put anything into perspective. She was still in school then. It actually lasted for me until Ten Love, a lunchtime performance at Bellevue, that the Mafaalani quarter fell: she had put an aging Romeo and Juliet on stage, and the aim was nothing but to send everyone home afterwards with more than a lump in their throats. It succeeded.
Ola Mafaalani's 'speech' at the Theatre Festival was, of course, a theatrical performance. One like Mafaalani thinks she should make. In its own way, this puts her in line with such luminaries as Elfriede Jelinek and Marina Abramovic, but because her playing ground is the Dutch theatre climate, she may not transcend the ground level.
Why some of those leading voices in the patriotic scene attacking her so hard is exactly the problem to which Dutch theatre is collapsing. We put things into perspective, don't act crazier than we already are, because that's already crazy enough and if we once hit someone with a clearly moving image, we immediately apologise for it. After all, messages are something for home, at the table.
Ola Mafaalani's speech was a protest against exactly that mentality. From the reactions, that protest has hit hard.
Chapeau.
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