'Return Turkey': brave confession from a gutmensch on #tfboulevard

The world is changing quite a bit and it is nice when artists do something with it. Festival Boulevard gives Lizzy Timmers the opportunity to make an attempt. That attempt, performed in a somewhat run-down cultural centre in a real Bossche power district, is quite something. Terugkeerturk is the name of this semi-documentary performance.

Timmers has studied young, well-educated, well-established Turks who turn their backs on the Netherlands and travel to Istanbul. Their stories come together with her own in the reading by actress Yonina Spijker, or rather the story of someone from Amsterdam who has immersed herself in them.

Despair

Anyone who has followed the work of Lizzy Timmers, now the Lizzy Timmers Group, a little, will recognise much in the wavering chop-chop stuff, in which the personal is never very far away from the big social story. Once again, she manages to capture the desperation of the leftist gutmensch which she is after all, well conveyed. Yonina Spijker is a wonderful performer, who manages to keep the audience on their toes with her bright eyes. With minimal vocal inflection, she changes characters. Her scene about a Moroccan boy from an Amsterdam working-class neighbourhood who has to take tutoring lessons in Amsterdam South is hilarious, heartbreaking and confrontational at the same time.

The performance features two outstanding musicians: Floris van Bergeijk and Ata Grüner. The latter is a Turk himself and when he goes outside at a certain point to smoke a cigarette, it seems as if it really gets too much for him for a moment, all that talk about Turkey, Islam, Erdogan and opportunity and discrimination. Something like that gets to you.

Theatre punk

What does not touch at all next is the performance by yet another young Flemish actor I saw afterwards. In A Winter's Tale, about eight actors, including the old stage god Sam Bogaerts, do a theatre punk version of one of Shakespeare's lesser plays: Winter's Tale. That play has hardly ever been performed in our language area and is therefore completely unknown to the public. In this adaptation, it is Shakespeare himself who returns to earth as a kind of Jesus to give his play a better fate than the apparently reviled status the text now has.

Funny, of course, if anyone in this day and age had really had reason to worry about A Winter's Tale's reputation. Which is not the case. Then - as a second reason - it could still be that all of us would suddenly, after it was finished, come to the clear understanding that A Winter's Tale was unfairly maligned, and that, with that slight adjustment in this adaptation, it would suddenly have become a horribly topical, necessary and inescapable piece of theatre.

Perceval

Neither happens, because in the search for a punk form that we indeed saw in real life with wild Flemish frontman Luc Perceval about 15 years ago, any further meaning is lost. We see a lot of suggested exchange of bodily fluids, a few attractive, a few repulsive bodies, a lot of vanity and we hear a Shakespeare who, as the drummer in the band, keeps hitting annoyingly far behind the beat, which comes across as very amateurish.

And now don't say that's all right with punk. Here, a younger generation is imitating the form, without making, or feeling, any content. While Belgium is burning just a bit harder than the Netherlands. For now. Fortunately, we have Lizzy Timmers.