Fifty-three 'ultras' from a football club in an art theatre. That might be asking for trouble. Especially if they were the hard core of, say, Ajax, FC Den Haag or FC Utrecht. But this is France. There are no hooligans in France. The ''Ultra's' from Racing Club de Lens, for example: they are bound to throw a punch somewhere, but basically it is just a merry gang.
That merry gang is visiting Amsterdam during the 2018 Holland Festival. They have been brought together by the French Football fanatic and theatre maker Mohamed el Khatib. He was looking for a way to bring his two great loves together, he says during an interview I had with him in Nantes, where his supporters' club was lovingly received by the supporters of the local FC, who a special festival had organised for them.
People's festival
'I didn't know Racing Club de Lens until I went to watch it once. It was a Monday night in winter. What happened on the pitch was downright boring. But in the stands were 30,000 people and it was a madhouse. A people's party, where all walks of life took part. A real family outing. There were remarkably many women there too. And all of them were proud of their club, and proud of their region.'
This is all the more special, says the director, because RC de Lens is dangling at the very bottom of the league: "There are teams, which attract a lot of public when they are at the top of the premier league. As soon as things slow down, there is less of an audience than at Lens, which plays in the second division. It is always full there. During a match, there are more fans in the stadium than there are residents of Lens.'
'I wanted more people to be able to see what was going on there. Then I started talking to the club and the supporters' association because I wanted them on the scene.'
Cultural pettiness
For Mohamed el Khatib, the project serves a higher purpose: 'In the theatre, you always see the same people: the cultural petty bourgeoisie. There is no difference at all, wherever you go: that doesn't mix with anything. Whereas in the stadium I see all social classes, workers, but also doctors, lawyers and proletarians and poor people. People always say that the theatre is the place where democracy takes shape, but you only have to look at who sits there, especially older people, to know that it doesn't.'
'So I said to myself: how can I now make sure that people who don't get into theatre do get in? Many people don't go now because they are not used to it, because they don't know the codes. They don't know how it works.'
Gentrification
'Then I thought: you can also turn it around. Put those people who never come to the theatre on stage instead of in the stands. Then you change what happens on stage, and so what happens in the stands also changes. Once you can see people who look like you in the theatre, you get more connected to them than in classical theatre. that is my political motivation, to make the true encounter happen again in the theatre.'
'But there are other reasons: gentrification is one. This is already happening very much abroad, in England for example, that football clubs are being privatised. And often that leads to the new owner raising the price of tickets. Now, for an Arsenal match, you easily pay £150 to £200. The lower classes can no longer afford that.'
No politics
'The latest development in France also worries me. Macron has banned any form of politics from stadiums. So you are no longer allowed to write political slogans on a banner. That means there are tremendous controls, and that is now leading football supporters to fight a battle for freedom of expression in stadiums. There is also the right of association that is now being thwarted. The police commissioner can now ban supporters from travelling with their club. These are precautions against violence, but there was hardly any anyway. I see it as an abuse of power by the judiciary.'
'And it's not just about football. It is also going to apply to environmentalists and other groups. So football supporters are now a vanguard in the fight against the police state that France is establishing. I would like to support that counterculture with my work. It is already the case that all supporters' clubs are acting together against this legislation. One day they are still facing each other in the stands, the next day they are demonstrating together against government policy.'
Arab Spring
'The government is afraid of the big grassroots movements. It's fine if they are in the stadiums every game, but outside of that they don't want to be bothered by them.'
'Before this show, I talked a lot to lawyers who work for supporters. They often do so for free. When I ask why,. they say they don't care about the supporters. Their struggle is about the militants of tomorrow. The environmentalists, the fighters for gay marriage, the civil rights movement, you name it. The government is now trying out on supporters what they can do later everywhere. Files are kept on supporters that are shared with other parties. That is illegal, but if it is tolerated here it will be introduced everywhere tomorrow.'
'Of course, it is also true that supporters are used to challenging authority. That is simply the habit. you also saw that during the Arab Spring, supporter groups supported the protesters and shared their methods of tricking the police.
Still, we should not politicise supporters too much. 80 per cent of supporters don't care about politics at all.'
Andromaque
Speaking of culture, isn't this performance also meant to teach supporters something of high culture, or at least bridge the gap from both sides?
'The problem is already in the word "high" and "low" culture. It implies that one is above the other. Whereas I prefer to see it as a juxtaposition. Popular culture is one side, bourgeois art is the other. Putting them side by side makes the story clear, that rapprochement must come from both sides. It's not about one should 'move up' to the other, or conversely 'move down': it's about moving towards each other on the same spectrum, at the same level.'
'Football is as legitimate a classicist tragedy as Andromaque. But for someone unfamiliar with it to become acquainted with Andromaque, the venue has to be warmed up. The theatre has to become a more open, warm and friendly place.'
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