In the days when Europe was still a loose collection of city-states and duchies, where groups of men, for want of football, went on raids a few times a year to burn houses and rape women, a language emerged in the marshlands of the Rhine delta. We know this because plays were written in that language, which are among the earliest preserved theatrical evidence in the world. Something that today's speakers of that language, Dutch, know precious little about. Good, then, that Theatre Group Alum is pulling Dutch theatre history out from under the dust.
Alum, that is the company around creators Erik Snel and Victorine Plante, a duo that has been working for years on unexpected adaptations of unexpected plays for unexpected audiences. The house company of Utrecht's Theater Kikker has grown big by staying small. Now, with De Hollanders, they take a new step on their journey through what used to be called Vaderlandsche Geschiedenis. And it is a very fine theatrical event.
A solid bias.
Elckerlyc, Mariken, De Abele Spelen, Vondel, Bredero, Foquenbroch: not exactly 'household names' to put it in proper Dutch. Rarely to be seen on the contemporary stage, and that's partly down to us. As recently as 1990, I a large survey done to it, and had to note - with colleague Dan Rapaport - that there was a firm bias among our playwrights about the quality of our own stage works.
Now, there are all sorts of reasons for this: the Dutch language ages faster than English or French, and our religious past ensures that works have been regularly banned throughout history. 17th-century Reformed people, for example, thought Vondel was too Romanesque; Catholics considered Mariken van Nimwegen too sinful. Contemporary theatre-makers, in turn, find that whole theatrical past too pious and moralistic.
Fresh urgency
That was all before Game of Thrones, and so now you revisit all those plays and see a pretty rich tradition of not even such lousy stories. Central to Alum's show is a medley of a few well-known and mostly unknown classics that passes by the audience with fresh urgency and plenty of perspective in about an hour and a half. Four actors, dozens of roles, a few clouds of smoke and angelic wings later, you know that a play like Lanselut of Denmark is really just an insanely strong story, with betrayal, rape, power and cowardice. Lucifer, by Joost van den Vondel, has some wonderful descriptions of battles that Lord of The Rings could take a punt on. The Min in 't Lazarus House is just a very clever comedy.
The afternoon before Christmas at Theatre Kikker had another very pleasant surprise: two young actresses who make up Toneelgroep Lam did something very fine with Gloriant, one of the four surviving Abele plays. The love story about not-so-heroic knight and a slightly too rutting lady was given a whatsapp/Tinder treatment by these fresh-faced creators. Live chat with an acting style that fits very much into what we will then call the Fleabag approach. Loose, slightly millennial, with a fat wink without losing seriousness: this was so incredibly fun that, as a hired support act, they almost overshadowed the main programme.
Cabaret.
With all the standards, all the preachiness and the emphasis on language that also clung to the Rederijkers, say the Frits Spits guilds that populated our medieval cities, you could say that the roots of contemporary cabaret were laid in those Middle Ages. Our unique national preference for a theatrical form largely made up of jokes and morality, which exists nowhere else. It is nice to see on a night like this that there is indeed a line to be drawn, although it will help that Victorine Plante herself has a past in cabaret. And of course, it's always easy to spot lines looking backwards.
Indeed, Studio Figur proves that it doesn't all have to be cabaretesk, with a wonderful gem of visual mini theatre in a very small booth in the market square that Theatre Group Alum has made of Kikker's Great Hall. They are doing something with the Abel Play Vanden winter ende vanden somer, about two lovers who always seek each other, but always lose. Poetry on the square: beautiful.
Alum has done something wonderful with this project that highlights an unjustly forgotten part of our history. It is also brave that they are doing so at a time when the very history of the Rhine delta is increasingly the domain of unsavory people who want to promote a national, Christian and mostly white identity want to connect to something as fragile as our cultural past.
Good to know
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
