Many theatre practitioners secretly beg for the introduction of corporal punishment for schoolchildren with CKV. Indeed, schoolchildren with CKV are bent on ruining the lives of actors. They are assisted in this by disinterested teachers, who on their nights off are more concerned to please their pupils than the providers of culture. As a compromise, there are quotas for schoolchildren with CKV. They must always be in the minority in the audience.
On Tuesday, September 29, 2015, students with CKV were in the majority. I attended a try-out of Zep's Othello at Amsterdam's Theater Bellevue and was among 240 youngsters. The cheering crowd had stormed the stands shortly before. The play lasted 1 hour and 40 minutes. Yet no one missed a letter of the performance. How could that be? I explain.
1: Do a prologue.
Prologues have been held in Greece since the very first theatrical performance was performed in a city square more than 3,000 years ago. In a prologue, an actor asks the audience for attention, for silence, for civility and time. If the actor does this well, he gets it. If the actor's name is Kenneth Herdigein, the evening cannot fail. After all, with Kenneth you don't solve. You know that, as an adolescent with sick plans. So you abandon those plans.
2: Let Brainpower refresh the lyrics
Most Dutch translations of Shakespeare are nothing to go by. We need many more words than Shakespeare and even then our language falls short. We also have required four or six jambes, where the great William always stuck to five trochees had enough. So our rhythm is either Ivo de Wijs, either Vondel, but never Shakespeare. unless you have the idiom and rhythm of hip-hop adds. Then suddenly everything is possible. You do miss a meaning layer or four, but if your goal is to keep 240 schoolchildren on task, many means are sanctified.
3: Raise questions.
Zep, the company now performing Othello, wanted to do things completely differently. Shakespeare wrote a play about a Moor (black) who gets a high position in Malta (white) and who marries a beautiful local maid. Also white. Because in Shakespeare's time racism was not an issue at all, or rather standing culture, a lot of evil could be attributed to the black moor, which Shakespeare then conveniently used, to bring about a semi-reversal. Hat white character Iago, lieutenant of the Moor, conspires with the audience to strip the savage black beast of its layer of civilisation. It succeeds. With the familiar tragic result. Director Pluymakers now turns the tables. Everyone in Malta is black except the Moor, who is white. Because the language has not been changed, and Othello is still referred to as the black Moor, everyone sits around wondering how racist it all is, and how bad that is. That distracts. It makes you think. Smart.
4: Lucretia van der Vloot
This is called kleinkunstenares, but does great things. Lucretia van der Vloot plays a number of female roles in the play adapted for six actors, and she does so sometimes funny, sometimes nice, and once really very well. The monologue in which Emilia, Iago's wife, finds out about her husband's betrayal is at a rhythm that will make many a rapper collapse. Grandmaster van der Vloot. Nowhere on the beat, but perfectly in the flow, she sings her anger in the best spoken word tradition imaginable. Epic.
5: Fuck the transmitter microphone
Kenneth Herdigein suffered first: crackling cables. He became irritated with the faltering technology of his transmitter microphone. And he became harder to follow. As no replacement equipment could be arranged, so the thing just went out. Kenneth Herdigein went acoustic. What a relief. He has enough vocal technique to make no one hear the difference. A lot of actors could learn something from that. And a lower volume on stage results in a lower volume in the auditorium. How simple it can be.
6: Do the killing...
...And do him justice. Othello strangling his beloved Desdemona. That has cut through every audience for several centuries. Even to the girls next to me who had been to a horror film in preparation. Chilled to the bone. Murder is more exciting live than in the cinema.
7: Make sure you include the right schools.
Amsterdam has the ivko. That is a special section of the Montessori school, where children with art ambitions can follow their ideals. At the Individual Continuing Arts Education so they also learn respect. Because what you don't have for another, you can't ask from that other. Half of the students in the room were from this school. Were possibly a few future song contestwinners between.
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