The much nudity and sex in Angelica Liddel's adaptation of Hawthorne's famous novel are a bit old-fashioned. The Spanish language is the real attraction.
In his review of Angélica Liddell's performance 'The Scarlet Letter' on this website, Wijbrand Schaap calls the scene with a naked black man 'a painful low point'. According to Schaap, the man is treated by Lidell as a 'rutting primal beast' and 'faceless object for a white woman's unlimited lust fantasy'.
This reminds me of the controversy surrounding Lionel Shriver's novel The Mandibles, which also raged briefly but fiercely here. In the novel, a black, demented woman is carried away on a dog leash. Many people feel that a white writer should never do such a thing to a black character. The anger surrounding Robert Vuijsje's 'Only But Neat People' has not calmed down after a decade. Anti-racists blame Vuijsje for performing characters who are prejudiced against black people and who see black women as sex objects.
It is precisely this neo-puritanism that Liddell rails against. "When are you coming to empty our libraries?!", she shouts during one of her long monologues in the show. Liddell is overtly referring to the #Metoo-movement, which she calls - I paraphrase from memory because I couldn't take notes in the dark - a trial without judges, in which the verdict is delivered in the tabloids at the hairdresser's, in between recipes den fashion tips.
Victimless crimes
The sexual violence perpetrated by #Metoo denounced, Liddell calls crimes without criminals and victims (or something to that effect). According to her, love does not go without violence and passion does not allow itself to be knitted. Beauty cannot exist at all without ugliness, love not without hate, tenderness not without violence. "My freedom is unlimited, which is precisely why I need rules," she also shouts somewhere.
I must say that I have often wondered the same thing since childhood, whether world peace is really so desirable. Isn't life interesting precisely because of the danger of failure and unhappiness, don't we create art to ward off death, don't we enjoy beauty because it is temporary? Don't we cherish peace precisely because war is always imminent?
Art says something about our existence on earth. That is not always rose-coloured. Neopuritans think art should be about how things should be. They only want to see pink, but that is kitsch. There is discrimination in our reality, so there is also discrimination in art. People are objects of lust in our reality, so they are in paintings, in novels and on stage too.
Symbol of evil
The black man in Liddell's adaptation of The Scarlet Letter is based on the black character in the novel. Hawthorne depicts him as a symbol of Evil, ever present to seduce pure souls. Liddell has made him into a kind of Rousseau Caliban. It is her character Hester who seduces and bewitches him, shouting at him that she is not interested in his black body, but in his black soul. She plays him like a witch as he dances as if he is in a trance and drool flows from his mouth.
After everything I had read about Liddell, about sex on stage, self-mutilation and lots of texts about 'political corectness', I was honestly a tiny bit disappointed by the performance. Yes, there are naked men walking on stage and Liddell takes the dick of one of them in her mouth, and one of the men puts his finger in her pussy, but it's not like this is the first time anyone has done something like this.
I saw a woman shitting on stage, on VPRO television, in 1983. I went to a performance of The Blooming Virgins, who were naked pretty much all the time. Never heard from them again, by the way, The Blooming Virgins.
The nudity and sex in The Scarlet Letter are not titillating, it is all rather casual, like in the 1970s, the decade when I was a kid and you could casually see nudity everywhere and no one was bothered about it. What did bother me were the many lyrics being poured over the audience, in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, whose Dutch and English translations were projected above the players, and on screens at the side of the stage. An overload of texts, most of which I did not understand or only half understood, and I missed quite a bit of action on stage because of it.
Old women
At some point, I decided to concentrate on Liddell's Spanish, beautiful, merciless Spanish with which she delivers harsh punches to the audience. There is a long, Celinesque monologue about old women who, according to Liddell, herself 53, stop being desirable after the age of 40 and can only hate and condemn. Who put themselves on a pedestal and glorify for no reason. Especially the women in the audience, and there were not many under forty among them, laughed hard.
Mainly because of the sounds too, it is wonderful to listen to Liddell's screams. Her panting and moans and groans are also a delight. She really lets herself go all the way.
But the stuff with those tables being lugged across that stage by naked men, those endless line-ups in rows and human pyramids with flowers up their asses and everything, it all takes too long and invariably gets boring at some point.
Neat people
And there is something paradoxical about Liddell's provocations. You sit there among the grey people who have neatly bought a ticket in the neat Stadsschouwburg and then sit there politely for an hour and three-quarters watching these excesses, applauding neatly and then going to drink white wine in the lounge.
In the end, everyone stays neatly within the lines anyway, including Liddell and her naked men. I doubt she is going to change anything about the neopuritanism that is everywhere now. In fact, she gets noticed thanks to those neopuritans.
But that irony will no doubt have been noted by her too.
Peter Breedveld is a journalist in all sorts of fields, but people mainly get a rolling stroke from his website www.FrontaalNaakt.nl.
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