Janine Abbring has managed to pull the somewhat ramshackle institution Zomergasten out of the doldrums. She has fun, is excellently prepared, is genuinely interested in her guests and has managed to push the eternal battle element into the background without making the broadcasts less exciting. That battle element was always: does the interviewer succeed in 'breaking' the guest? Because that was what we, sensation-hungry viewers, increasingly cared about anyway.
Guests can spend at least six months preparing for a television night that will make or break their reputation for years to come. So then you come prepared. With a chewed-out story that doesn't excite anywhere. So it was up to the presenter/interviewer to make that story exciting, usually by pulling a rabbit out of a top hat somewhere halfway through the evening that the guest wanted to keep hidden. Then the hunting season was open: the earlier in the evening that breaking point, the more woeful, actually, depending on the guest and his interesting life.
Curious
Janine Abbring did not go hunting in the broadcasts under her regime. This sometimes much to the irritation of some of the twittering viewership, but I found it fascinating. After all, Abbring did not have to hunt because she had better tools at her disposal: the aforementioned curiosity and openness, a bit of personal input and, above all, giving the guest the confidence that no trap had been prepared by the editors.
Instead of predictable conversations, this resulted in evenings where people would eventually come up with outpourings of their own that they had not planned to make beforehand. With Janine Abbring, the VPRO realised that a good conversation goes both ways, and that pulling and sucking rarely yields exciting TV, but rather rancid ratings porn.
Bambi
How did that work for the very last episode of season 2019? Abbring had before him the guest of guests: Ivo van Hove. At first sight an amiable Flemish genius, at second sight a control freak who will never relinquish his power. Van Hove cannot be 'broken', generations of seasoned actors and critics have already tried that and it yielded few survivors on that side.
Van Hove had a story ready and because he is a genius, that story was perfect. By putting the scene from Bambi on air right from the start, the audience was broken and thus made receptive to everything that was to come. Basic theatre theory, and it works. Van hove also made it clear that he would be very open, would get emotional, but dosed and at the moments he determined.
Amiable
Abbring could do little more than follow. She sputtered a little here and there by bringing in something personal of hers, but it was very soon clear that Van Hove had not come to listen to her. Amiable as ever, he manoeuvred her, and with her us, the viewers, exactly where everyone was most effective. So it was really wonderful to see, because this is how Van Hove's theatre works: he suggests openness, but builds a trap, and nobody, not even the actors, knows where exactly it is and how exactly it works.
That's why actors run away with Van Hove, or hate him deeply. Van Hove doesn't let himself be fooled, but in the meantime he doles you into a performance that has great effect, but you are not at the controls.
Bowie moment
The best way to see that was at the absolute end during the broadcast of Zomergasten. And I'm not even talking about the carefully planned Bowie moment, of which he is not only justifiably proud, and still deeply moved by, but, after the enumeration of powerful men and their influence that the whole evening was about, it was also a demonstration of the pinnacle of Van Hove's own ability. After all, he had bettered his great master in his last creative expression, by choosing not Fame but Heroes as the finale of the musical Lazarus. He got a double thumbs-up for it from the dying pop legend. Nice that he recognised his superior in others in some situations, and nice that this time it was Van Hove.
After the heartfelt tears for Bowie's last recorded breath, a kind of catharsis, or unmasking, then followed in the credits. To the breaking string sounds of Bowie's swan song Lazarus, we saw all the fragments of the evening pass in short shots and reverse order. Back from the dying David Bowie, through the artist who brought us the images of Dachau, the elusive architect who shaped Pakistan's democracy, and the woman who tried to translate Dostoevsky, to the father of young Bambi disappearing into the fog.
Largest
Ivo van Hove spent an evening telling us about great artists, father figures with inimitable influence, whose true essence will always remain hidden from us. And Ivo himself is the greatest of them all. It is to his credit.
It was directed theatre from minute one to the finale. Wonderful to watch. We were tricked into it. With a wonderful lead role for Janine Abbring who began to look more and more like Halina Reijn.
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