This play is going to cost me a lot of friends, but it needs to get out. After all, the theatre industry is doing badly. And I can see more and more clearly where that is due to. And for once it's not Halbe Zijlstra. Or the VVD, or the population, or the Netherlands in general, or the zeitgeist. Nor is it down to Netflix or football, nor to Geert Wilders or Joost Niemöller, however much I would like them to be to blame for everything. It lies, friends and soon to be ex-friends, to the theatre industry itself. You have tried very hard over the past decades to bring the whole thing to its gallows, and you have succeeded. Congratulations.
The halls in the province are empty.
Our very own Onno Weggemans noted the recently in Amersfoort. Actor Louis van Beek sighed once more in the theatre sector's own medium, the Theaterkrant: audiences are staying away. No, of course not in Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg, nor at the premieres in 'the region', where the still very much suburban-focused theatre lovers have to go a few times a year. It is frighteningly quiet in Almere, in Amersfoort, in Beuningen and Sittard. Or in Assen. Only Meppel seems fantastic to go.
The cause? Too many theatres with too many big venues with no budget for decent (literally) staff and no connection to their own programme, or their own audience. This is not me saying this, but Ter Horst Committee who investigated the matter last year.
Everyone should go on tour
Every company making theatre in the Netherlands has to go on tour. Even if you don't receive a subsidy. This is because Dutch theatres are not equipped to show the same performance for longer than two days. Moreover, according to poorly conducted surveys, Dutch audiences seem unwilling to travel further than ten kilometres for a performance.
So every village puts up a theatre, and each actor has to travel into the country at least 30 times per production, by train, by private car, by taxi. Away at least three in the afternoon, because mysteriously the extra asphalt has led not to fewer, but more traffic jams, and that after a day of rehearsing the next play. Sometimes paid, usually unpaid, if you're not on payroll. Afterwards, breaking down yourself and no time for a beer with the audience, which has usually fled the unsociable foyer anyway.
You come home at 2 a.m., have to satisfy your partner, get a good night's sleep and be up again at nine for the next rehearsal. And that's five to six, sometimes seven days a week. For a pittance, because even the big musicals pay next to nothing.
Do you find it strange that sometimes in Appelscha it results in a lesser evening? Or in Almere, or Breda? It happens to the greatest. Just about the last ensemble still employing actors, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, has even built a small reputation in the industry for it. Outside the A10, there is quite often a party on stage, especially when the big boss is not present (quite often) and there are no acquaintances in the audience (regularly).
Directors took over
In Rotterdam, they are building a merger between a few large and small institutions. The Ro Theatre, Wunderbaum, a production house and the local theatre are all merging. For now, that results in a huge company with three directors at the top and no actors employed. This weekend, a newly appointed artistic director (Bianca van der Schoot) left the club, 'by mutual agreement', less than a month after she officially joined.
In a statement in Trouw, one of the three directors, Ellen Walraven, explains that the organisation prefers 'makers', who can be used loosely to support the targets of Theatre Factory Rotterdam, in terms of audience reach and choice of subjects, into view.
The Hague has been working on the same kind of construction in slightly more silence for some time. [hints]There are differences. On Facebook, company dramaturge Remco van Rijn responded with the following nuance: "Wait a minute, you have to explain this to me: 'many directors, a few loose makers and fewer actors' in The Hague? We used to have four directors for three institutions (NT, TahS and KS), which will become two or three when the merger file is finalised next year (depending on the decision of the Supervisory Board); we are going from three to four permanent directors, plus a fifth director who is following a four-year tailor-made trajectory; ánd we have expanded the ensemble to 17 actors full-time plus two actors part-time (and for those who can count well and know how many TA actors are actually already retired: so that's the largest ensemble in the Netherlands). So how about "few loose makers" and "fewer actors"[/hints]?
The public has lost its way
You will hopefully recognise a pattern in the problem outlined above. That pattern is called 'actor'. That actor is overtired, underpaid, always somewhere else and not taken seriously. Not by its own bosses. Not by the grant makers. Those who, in the quadrennial raffle, have even decided entirely independently to sacrifice the working conditions in the sector to a sufficiently broad selection of 'makers'.
And just let that actor, that awkward, money-consuming cog in that big picture of institutions, subsidy streams, dots on the horizon and innovation targets, be the only thing, really the only thing, that the audience comes to the theatre for. The actor and the more or less familiar story he or she tells. It has been researched. Spectators have no use for directors, let alone 'makers'. Even Ivo van Hove tells the experienced theatre-goer virtually nothing. Logical, because Ivo is not on stage either. There is only one company that enjoys national fame among audiences. That company, Orkater, has just been freed from its subsidy by the Performing Arts Fund. So Orkater was once a company where actors were number one.
The creator is a powerless supporter
The actor has given way to 'the maker' in the thinking of theatre educators, subsidisers, directors and programmers. The 'maker' is a non-descript creative entity that is supposed to find solutions to societal problems or have a unique and indispensable vision of world problems. The 'maker' is completely dependent for his or her existence on the benevolence of directors and subsidisers, and is also completely interchangeable.
The 'maker' is, in short, the freelance typesetter who has no attachment to any actor, to any place. The 'maker' has nothing to do with a specific audience. She is judged only on her uniqueness (for form), but mainly on her effect towards subsidisers and press.
Here with that theatre!
The world of creators, directors, programmers and subsidisers is completely detached from the world outside. It is described by fewer and fewer independent journalists and, because of ever-increasing performance pressure, is only concerned with itself.
Poor actors, poor spectators. The two sides that had defined theatre together since at least 472 BC: they were languishing.
Only one thing remains: demolish the theatres, put the directors on the street and put the creators in a playroom with a tub of Duplo.
Give theatre back to the actors and their audiences.
[Tweet "Demolish theatres, put directors on the street, stop makers with a bin of Duplo in a playroom"]
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
