On Saturday 4 June 2016, I attended the royal opening of the Holland Festival and was able to attend no review write about, because I was sitting in the front row of the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg. As the stage was elevated, I was looking against a black wall, above which only the front actors were visible. The back and lower half of the stage were completely eluding me.
Me wrote that on, and the Holland Festival generously offered me the opportunity to go and see the performance again, from a better seat. At the same time, the organisers told me that the first three rows of the Stadsschouwburg would be compensated at this performance. So I went to Amsterdam one more time, on Monday 6 June.
Before the performance, while not eating a blackened hamburger in theatre restaurant Stanislavski, I heard from the neat people at the little table next to me that the front seats were offered at a sharply reduced rate, and that people like them who had already bought tickets had the choice of thus getting a partial refund or going on the waiting list for a seat with better sightlines. Whether they eventually managed to get one of the spots with better visibility, I don't know. The performance was full, right down to those front rows with their lousy visibility.
What was the deal with that increase?
Amsterdam is the last theatre in the Netherlands where the stage floor slopes 10 degrees towards the auditorium. In all old theatres, this was common practice in order to keep the audience in the flat lying stalles still provide some view of the entire stage. With the rise of the travelling stage, during the 20th century, all remaining sloping stage floors were straightened, because it was impossible for set designers to build a set that could accommodate all those gradually different angles of inclination.
So except in Amsterdam, because, well, Amsterdam is Amsterdam and the sightlines for the stalles could not be improved any other way.
I experienced first-hand that this can lead to misery in 1991, when I was a directorial assistant on the tour of Beckett's Endgame by Het Zuidelijk Toneel. In that play, a character (Hamm) sits on a moving chair. In this case, the actor (Bert André) also couldn't reach the ground with his feet to keep the chair in place. Nor was that necessary anywhere except, of all places, in Amsterdam. Half an hour before the performance in Amsterdam, the technicians had mounted a brake on the chair, which could be operated by the other character (Clov). This brake broke off during Hans Kesting's first action with the wheelchair. He hardly got around to acting for an hour and a half after that. He was exclusively busy trying to prevent Bert André from driving off the sloping stage, into the front row.
Why this explanation? Well: it should be obvious that autonomous set pieces on wheels behave badly on a sloping theatre floor. And in Die Stunde Da Wir Nichts Voneinander Wussten, there is a 12-metre-wide, 6-metre-high wall on stage. On wheels. So you don't put a simple brake on that. I heard that technicians from the theatre and the visiting company had been working since Wednesday 1 June to level the floor. So with those disastrous consequences for the first three rows.
Was the play more enjoyable now?
I had now been put by the organisers in a seat next to the royal loge on the first balcony of the Stadsschouwburg. You can't get much better than that in Amsterdam. I had a perfect view of the viewing box that is the stage in this historic theatre, and in that viewing box I could indeed see how beautifully the Estonian directors had portrayed the play. The overview I now had provided a much greater impact of what was shown, which worked especially well for the massive, hushed choreographies, which fortunately were widely available. And which indeed covered the entire stage, something I could only have guessed during my first visit.
Remained that the scenes added to Peter Handke's original by the directing duo still excelled in superfluity. What was once intended by the author as scripted reality As a result, it degenerated into a rather flat revue, a dance macabre of European history facts and droll references to current events: Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet, refugees, terrorists, and finally the Chinese taking the place of the ageing Western man who has become carnival figures: with Mickey Mouse as the chief guest.
Even from the first balcony, by the way, the Gregorian chant worked perfectly.
The question remains why a play that relies so much on this focused gaze is shown in such a hall. The premiere hall in Hamburg also has the horseshoe shape with flat stalls that makes for such poor sightlines in Amsterdam: spectators on the side balconies mainly see actors hastily changing clothes, which distracts from the picture on stage. The makers seem to take for granted that only buyers of the middle seats see whatever they see.
What should we do with that theatre?
The semicircular theatre hall, with its sloping or non-sloping floor, also known as the 'bonbonnière', originated in the nineteenth century. It was a continuation of the Baroque theatres of the time of the great monarchies in Europe: halls where the stage was actually secondary, and people came mainly to watch each other and to be seen. Actually, those theatres, where king, queen and other dignitaries did not even sit in a royal loge, but looked into the hall from a seat next to the actors, were a kind of massive selfie sticks avant-la-lettre.
The first to really care about the sightlines for the audience was Richard Wagner, who wanted his operas to achieve a total experience, where everyone in the hall had a perfect view of the perfect illusion: he built specially for his Gesammtkunstwerke a theatre without royal boxes, without pompous seats, but with perfect sightlines for all: total immersion.
Shortly afterwards, the cinema was invented, which managed to achieve all this at a much lower price thanks to film.
All over Europe today, however, there are still those theatres with that quite beautiful, monumental design, where the artists who make performances there, together with the audience, have already agreed that there are actually only a few seats from which you have a good view of the action.
Increasingly, makers are resisting that rigid form requirement, and effectively undemocratic sightline terror. They break 'out of the frame', as Ivo van Hove regularly does, making 'stage upon stage' or turning away from those historic buildings altogether, to play on location or in more modern venues.
And new audiences entering such a venue with its lousy sightlines for the first time find it hard to be convinced to come to such an outdated building more often.
The alternative: pull through the stage, into the auditorium.
Toneelgroep Amsterdam has already done it once, for 'A perfect wedding': remove the chairs from the stalles and stage just through into the auditorium. The same thing legendary theatre innovator Peter Brook did with the old boulevard theatre he owns in Paris, Les Bouffes du Nord. That hall, too, is elevated, and it is a delight to be close to the actors, at the same level, living their stories. In fact, it marks a return to Shakespearean theatre design: anyone who visits the rebuilt Globe Theatre in London suddenly understands why Shakespeare's plays can be whispered in a hall that can accommodate 2,000 spectators (twice the size of Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg): the stage is high in the middle of the auditorium, so that even someone in the back row of the upper balcony is no further than six feet from the actors. Come up against that in a normal theatre.
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