Jetse Batelaan (Artemis) is a great innovator of theatre #tfboulevard

Jetse Batelaan is one of the greatest theatre innovators of this still young century. His star rose in 2003, with a show in which five unique actors made reality theatre, and vice versa. Now, 13 years later, Batelaan has been the boss of one of the country's best youth theatre companies for some time now, pushing the boundaries of that industry once again. And all in an extremely pleasantly abrasive way. As after his first work, after seeing 'How the big people left and what happened next' differently against theatre. And life, of course. What more could you want.

In the show, which premiered in Tilburg on Friday 12 August as one of the highlights of Festival Boulevard, the professional actors leave the stage halfway through. The medieval village built up as a set, which again looks very much like the farmhouse we saw at the beginning of the festival in Zvizdal (oh, lovely coincidence at a festival), is empty except for the hitherto only suggested children.

Headphones

Through clever, unobtrusive recruitment, a dozen children from the audience were provided with headphones before the performance. They now stand up from the audience, walk away from their parents and climb onto the stage. They show us exactly what happened to the children when the big people left that village. They don't think that up themselves, but perform the actions that are told to them through the headphones.

What until then still looks like a funny invention turns, in the last three quarters of an hour of the play, into something that says much more about generations and change than an ordinary play could. The children take over, disrupting the world their parents have left behind and eventually being able to start over on their own.

Abuse?

Children on stage, that's where every serious acting person loses out. Their open-mindedness and shamelessness attracts attention, and every adult human being is biologically compelled to total surrender to the charisma of children, just as it is for puppies and kittens. So does Jetse Batelaan abuse that fact, by performing children who are unaware of the effect they are being used for? Earlier this festival, a reviewer who refused to make a value judgment About the show MONA, in which a 12-year-old uttered the text of Griet Op de Beeck's bestseller. That child too would be unaware of the impact on herself and the audience of her performance.

My retort to that is simple: how many adult, professional actors are fully aware of the effect of what they do? A very small percentage, I fear. In the end, we, the audience, are always the ones who finish the story in our heads, without including the narrator. In the theatre, in front of the television, or on the favourite café terrace, where we fantasise about those weird people across the street. After all, life itself is theatre. And Batelaan makes us aware of this in a whole new way.