"It's all right." In how many songs of the Top 2000 does that phrase appear? Too many to list. So now the task is to find all those different "It's allright"'s to sing in the melody in which every audience will recognise them. The four players in 'Total Eclipse of The Heart' of Theatre Group Kassys thus fill a thick hour of theatre. Every word they utter is taken from the Top 2000: from Lou Reed to U2, from Abba to The Simple Minds. The effect is quite overwhelming, as I experienced first-hand when I attended a rehearsal a week or two before the premiere.
Theatre group Kassys is on the way back from a slump. Artistic mastermind Liesbeth Gritter needed a fat year of 're-energising' for a while, after hitting a dead end with what Kassys had become famous for: documentary theatre about human stasis, always linked to film, always viewed with anthropological distance. If it went well, a rollicking fit of laughter was guaranteed, without not also leaving something very tragic somewhere.
The year of re-energising provided Liesbeth Gritter with a now refurbished building site in Portugal, a dog and a new idea for a show. The starting point was that she wanted to see real intense emotions on stage: 'My work is generally quite stylised, subtle and understated. It's always about not expressing feelings. I really wanted to make something with big themes and pathetics for once. Whereas I actually hate that. So I wanted to see if I could find a form for that that would allow me to look at it without my toes curling into my shoes.'
It succeeded, she explains, but: 'It's still a real Kassys performance again.' How should we see that? Liesbeth Gritter explains: 'I always approach emotion and great drama in my own way anyway. After all, the tricky thing about theatre is that I find it hard to believe it when it is played with big emotions and gestures and there are big arguments, with lots of crying. Then I can't get into it. So I play with that: how do I make something believable that I myself find hard to believe in. That produces exciting things.'
During rehearsals, Gritter searches with her players for the ideal tone. Quite tricky. Not all of her actors grew up with pop music. For Gerardjan Rijnders, almost all the songs quoted from are completely unknown. The founder and former artistic director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam and much sought-after actor and performer grew up with classical music. When he quotes a line from Tina Turner's hit 'Tonight' has to sing, the notes mean little to him. So he has to work extra hard to make the performance, which is basically a through-composed musical, his own. His younger colleagues Harm van Geel, Peter Vandenbempt and Vincent Brons have less trouble with it. The real star of the show, by the way, won't mind it all, literally: the ten-year-old bitch Kinky, according to Gritter "a cross between something poodle-like and something of a terrier", spends her time on stage in serene tranquillity.
Gritter has a thing for animals and acting: 'Animals are an inexhaustible source of inspiration, amazement and recognition. I really like animals because they never pretend. I love watching animals and especially in relation to people. My performances are always about human behaviour. About why we do what we do and why we don't do what we really should do. And why we don't realise that and make the same mistakes over and over again. Animals don't suffer from that. They just follow their instincts.' One of her best performances, Good Cop, Bad Cop from 2007, was a perfect example. In that production, the actors on film gave meaning to the boredom of a bunch of pets left at home that they themselves played live.
Now Gritter no longer uses video, but the song lyrics have to give deeper meaning to the rather dog-like behaviour of the four actors: 'Pop music is directly linked to your own memories, to emotional situations, to the past. We are going to use that power in this performance. Everyone has memories of pop music. The hall is full of people with a backpack full of certain songs.'
With those memories and that music, Kassys also wants to explore those emotions more fiercely than ever before this time: 'Writers of pop lyrics dare to use very big words. If your relationship has just broken up, there won't be a pop song that says, "Ah, boy, it will be all right again, go have fun online dating!" Music says just the opposite: "Your life is over! Your heart is broken!" Pop lyrics don't trivialise. We use that energy.'
It works, it turns out during that drizzly Amsterdam morning. After a few scenes that are irresistibly comical even in this rehearsal setting, emotion suddenly sets in when one of the actors drops something from his hands and the actors then do a minimalist dance to Gary Jules' song 'Mad World'. It works, as only pop music can work.
After studying the lyrics, I can also easily see that the eternally down-to-earth and thoughtful Liesbeth Gritter reveals something of her person here: the feelings with which she left for Portugal to recuperate, and the feelings with which she returns to the Netherlands to make something very beautiful. Kassys has gained depth. That's allright.
Total Eclipse of The Heart is at Frascati Amsterdam from 27 October 2015 to 31 October 2015, followed by a tour of theatres in Lisbon, Ghent, Mechelen and Kortrijk. Next season, the show will also be shown in other Dutch cities.
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