Culture Press podcastcorona (21) - Oscar Kocken: 'Not being allowed to perform your work for six months is pretty gross.'

'Yes, of course it was something we already saw coming in every way. That made me mentally prepared. But then when you actually hear it... It's just SO sour. It's every time - I don't blame anyone, to be clear - but every time you get bad news, you try to recover, reset, make new plans. Then you go and do something else and another blow comes. You have to go through that same process again. That eats up energy.'

Oscar Kocken, independent theatre-maker, talk show host and creator, has had it for a while. We are speaking the day after it was officially announced that all summer festivals have been cancelled until 1 September 2020. And that was precisely where he had placed another glimmer of hope. As soon as the first 'intelligent lockdown' was declared, he threw himself into Twitter, where he set up his first Twitter talk show. A fun experience, he thought at the time, but nothing more.

War diary

He still had a financial cushion, 'though I hadn't counted on a global pandemic making all my work impossible, Mr Wiebes!' Since he had all the time anyway, he threw himself into a project for summer festivals. For some time there had been a plan to do something with his grandfather's war diary. After the liberation of Limburg in March 1945, he joined the Red Cross to help repatriate prisoners and wounded. He discovered that another exciting request had been added: the request to return a little Bible that a badly wounded soldier had given to grandpa, with the wish to give it to his family.

Oscar's search attracted a lot of attention online, including from the national media, and also eventually produced a surprising outcome: the soldier had survived the war and was married. Oscar's grandfather had always almost tracked him down, but had not found him. The soldier died in 2010 and Oscar is now making it a project to return the bible to his widow as soon as corona allows. It was all supposed to lead to an intimate performance at the Bossche theatre festival Boulevard. Which will now, therefore, not go ahead.

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The full version of this story appears on the Corona website of the municipality of Utrecht.