Nottrot's Cherry Garden: fascinating evening of philosophy on Greek cottage

What is a memory worth? A first kiss, for example: how much poorer are you if it is forgotten? In hard euros. Such questions Greg Nottrot likes to ask his audience, and we, his grateful listeners, gladly join in his money thought experiments. The man who, together with Oscar Kocken, created the revolutionary concept of the live talk show Order of the Day conceived, is now creating, under the direction of his life partner Floor Leene, a solo performance that is precisely about the price of a memory. He does so based on Chekhov's classic The Cherry Garden, but gives it a Greek twist that goes beyond an evening of nostalgic location theatre.

Cheating

Nottrot's version of The Cherry Garden plays in a new complex of studio houses in Utrecht Leidsche Rijn, with the main attraction being the century-old 'standard' cherry orchard that serves as a communal garden for the neighbourhood. The meeting organised by Nottrot under the aegis of his Nieuw Utrechts Toneel was actually supposed to have taken place under those trees, but due to impending bad weather, it was moved indoors. The gleaming white central corridor of the studio flats was an almost equally good setting for this evening of discussion, cum theatre performance, cum merry rant with almost-free drinks for all. In which he immediately answered the question: how important is something tangible like a tree, a setting or a place for perception and memory? Not so, our stories are inside us, and not in stones.

Monuments

All NUT's work has the same characteristic: theatre is not a place for monuments and illusions, but should be about the personal lives of actor and audience, and preferably also tell something about the world.

Nottrot has a Greek mother and a Dutch father. Near Athens, on the island of Salamina, there is a small house, which serves as a holiday home for the whole family. Then the comparison with Chekhov's Cherry Garden quickly made, of course: a summer residence also takes centre stage in Chekhov's centenary play. In Chekhov, it is about the impending sale of the estate, and thus about goodbye, about the new age, about decay and melancholy. All this in a comedy in which the old guard, the keepers of tradition, become increasingly tragic and ridiculous in their efforts to preserve the past. Nottrot loosely translates that story into the same problem at play with the family's Greek cottage, and he does it so well that everyone, even his own family, falls for it.

New genre

Because that, then, is what the eternally engaging playwright does manage: he can make you think that an old barn is actually a villa, or a run-down Trabant merely a Ferrari with an image problem. But Greg Nottrot, then, is no dodgy estate agent or typical used-car salesman. His talent applies to theatre, and his knowledge that audiences are best off finishing his story themselves.

In this way, you automatically create a new genre, and for this, this Utrecht creator has rightly been rewarded with financial support for the next four years. So that many more people can walk with him on and across the border between fiction and reality. And so that he can continue to pay the rent of that beautiful studio flat, with that wonderful, old cherry garden, for a while longer.