No man can escape Nottrots Thundering Time. (Theatre with built-in escaperoom)

'Can I ask you: do you know what time is?' Greg Nottrot's question cannot be straightforward, as I am the only spectator. MIjn spot is uncomfortable: a chair sinking into fresh gravel on the curious Utrecht plain christened 'Berlinplein' by city developers. I witness an early rehearsal of The Thundering Time. In that play, which can be seen on location in Utrecht from 9 to 27 August (including dinner and escaperoom), Greg Nottrot asks the audience many such questions. Something that, with my innate shyness, I find quite scary.

I can't manage to maintain my rigid spectator attitude. So I try an answer: 'Time is the difference between then and now.' Or something along those lines. Nottrot is pleased and continues his inspired argument against the imaginary stand around me. Helped by what he believes to be my keen observation. Fine compliment. I am now complicit and will pay closer attention for the rest of the afternoon.

Experience

A play by Greg Nottrot is always an experience. Most people who frequent a theatre may know him from Order of the Day. In it, the Utrecht-trained actor takes on current affairs with a team of writers and actors. It is exciting and innovative theatre, setting a new standard.

The Thundering Time is smaller in scope. At least in terms of the number of participating actors. We now have to contend with Greg Nottrot himself, his partner and colleague Floor Leene and musician Pascal van Hulst. To manage the trio's burst of creative energy, Daniël van Klaveren has been put in front of the group as final director.

The performance was inspired by a historical event. On 15 February 1894, an attack on the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in England failed. This was a special place because the 0 meridian had been established exactly there ten years earlier. It was also where the clock to which all the world's clocks had to obey had been housed ever since.

Outsmarted

The story has been singing around in Nottrot's head for some time, he says after the rehearsal: 'More because of the joke actually: man wants to attack time with a time bomb and the time bomb goes off too early. He is also the only victim. So someone wants to attack time and time outsmarts him again.'

Again, it has become very much a Greg Nottrot performance. Nottrot himself explains what that means: 'The big trick, of course, is that we always approach a subject from our personal lives. And of course I am a lousy actor, so initially I am always Greg. Greg can take different guises, can put on a superman suit at Oerol, and try to be superman... But I remain Greg. So it starts with a detective looking for the motives of an 1894 anarchist, and within ten minutes it's about Floor getting older and about me because I'm always late.'

'That personal basis is always our thing. We always rehearse everything, but when the audience is there, I still hope it looks like it's made on the spot.'

Work and private life

A good example of where that can lead was Geheim, a play on the occasion of the opening of the Castellum theatre in Leidsche Rijn. Nottrot: 'That was about a woman who was pregnant without knowing it. That ran a bit parallel to the story of Floor and her pregnancy and how we had to deal with it. Now the story is much more about the drudgery of time. How to escape transience, decay, repetition, rhythm, also stress, busyness and agitation. Those personal themes are actually much more important, but meanwhile we pretend to tell the story of someone from 1894. Or pretend to: it's the same story, of course.'

'Is it that bad, two years later?', I ask. Nottrot smiles. 'It's a performance, of course. Whether it's true I don't say.' I reply that with performances of his that is always a bit of a question. 'Definitely,' he says triumphantly. 'Also in this performance there are at least ten things that are true, but also at least ten things that are not true at all.'

Topicality

'That will be a guessing game,' I say. Nottrot nods. 'There is one thing in the performance that I already know that afterwards everyone is going to ask me, "Is that really so?" And no, it's not really like that, but I'll deny that afterwards and then I already know that precisely because I deny it everyone will think it's true anyway.'

The question, of course, is whether that all distracts from the topical message. According to Nottrot, that is not an issue. 'At the Order of the Day, we are all about current affairs every time. The literal topicality of the past month. With summer performances like this, we always want to get away from that topicality. Yet we're going to talk about a terrorist. That feels super topical somewhere. For now, the summer has been relatively quiet compared to previous summers, but in the spring we already had three attacks in London.'

'Now we wanted to put that raw topicality behind us and focus on that very first suicide bomber on English soil. It is fascinating to see that there are a lot of parallels. After the attack, the British were about to close the borders to all French people. After all, the attacker was a Frenchman. To the English at the time, the French were what Syrians are today. The Mediterranean now? That was The Channel then.'

Time is a construct

'What also fascinates me is the attack on time itself. Before starting this piece, I never realised that time is a construct. I always perceived time as something scientific. When you start delving into it, you first learn that time is only very recent. That we have a shared time is only something of the last century.'

'That time is also an instrument that is almost capitalist. With industrialisation, the clock started ticking in Greenwich. Since then, it has been ticking faster and faster. This huge acceleration we are experiencing actually started back then. With the rise of the car, telephony, factories, machines. A lot of the themes of characters in the art of the time are also about stress, about acceleration and about resistance to time.'

Is that all the fault of the clock, and not time?

To blame for everything

'Yes, I think the clock is actually guilty. It's not that the clock just happens to show time. I do think that clock does hunt us down. And that that clock is really not only an instrument to order the world, but also an instrument to force the world. As a result, we also have to be efficient. The clock makes our performance measurable. First, you want to do as much as possible in the time given to you and second, you want to get as old as possible. I think before the advent of the world clock, time was really something else.'

And suddenly we are in the middle of current events. With his performance, Nottrot wants to get a glimpse into the mind of the suicide bomber.

'The anarchists were against the fact that the elite determined time. The terrorists who carry out attacks now also do so against an elite. I don't think that necessarily stems very much from a religion. It is interesting, though, to keep asking yourself what the personal motives of these guys are. That is what we are investigating now: why exactly did this Martial Bourdin want to make that attack on time? Then you notice, for example, that it also has to do with the fact that he was a tailor. At that time, the profession changed from a craftsman like a tailor to a factory worker. In a very short time. The introduction of the sewing machine and the invention of ready-to-wear had a huge impact.'

Tailors the juggernaut

'That whole wave of anarchist attacks back then was largely perpetrated by tailors. Of course, it is the crafts that are the first to be lost when it comes to efficiency and faster and more. That was the petrol that fed the terrorists' fire.'

Nottrot's performances always excel in the vast mountain of knowledge gained from them. He is very fond of research, he acknowledges: 'I believe I always have to become obsessed with my subject in some way. But I don't write either. Floor writes. She is in a completely different flow and can write dialogues very well. She approaches it from the personal and writes all the dialogues between us. That's because she is very good at listening to how we talk in the house.'

'I can't write. I read a lot, and then I want to tell a lot, all the time. Meanwhile, it turns out that during that telling, I am already practising a bit. During rehearsal, it then turns out which stories are too much, or too long. So only a tenth of everything I know and have looked up ends up in the performance. At first I think that's really stupid, because everyone wants to know everything anyway, but then that has to take shape.'

Documentary autistic

It's not always easy, I'm told. Yet it always works out. 'So basically, whatever is story and whatever is people-driven comes from Floor, and anything documentary autistic comes from me. Often that division into characters is noticeable on the floor.'

Ultimately, Nottrot doesn't want to make it a private party: 'What I really like is when people who don't know us come to the show and just see two actors and two characters. That they don't know we have a relationship. That's why we make up enough to make it universal.'

'Ultimately, this show is more about people aged 20 to 50 in this day and age, than specifically about us. Actually, it's about everyone trying to combine career, love and life in the limited time given to do so. If I have to cheat in order to do that, it's perfectly fine in the play, but it doesn't have to happen in real life as well.'

Not playing

'The same goes for the more documentary part of the show. For the grace of the story, I am not ashamed to sometimes change things about reality if they are more convenient. If it suits better that Martial Bourdin was in Chicago because that's where the largest slaughterhouse in the world happens to be opened, I make that up. Because at the end of the day, it's a performance. But the very best thing about theatre is that people can think it's real.'

'In theatre, you agree to play for the next 90 minutes. Even if I suggest to you that we don't play.'

 

The Thundering Time will be played from 9 to 27 August at the Berlin Square in the centre of Utrecht Leidsche Rijn. Tickets include dinner and an escaperoom. More info and reservations.