Eddy Bellegueule live. Still impressive, but also makes you yearn for the real thing.

The best way to adapt a book is to turn it into a narrative performance. Such theatre, where the actors focus loosely on the audience and bring the story as a story, I often saw in my years as a youth theatre critic. Almost always good and young audiences enjoyed it. I wondered why this kind of eager theatre is so rarely made for adult audiences, even as recently as last week in A podcast interview with Moniek Merkx, who pretty much invented that genre.

Yesterday, I finally saw 'Away with Eddy Bellegueule', the theatre hit of the previous broken and devastated theatre season, and saw that its creators had effortlessly bridged the gap between youth and grown-up theatre. The show is a nineties grunge concert with brilliant actors and intense visual direction by rising star Eline Arbo.

High praise

Not very many people got to see 'Gone with Eddy Bellegueule' until yesterday, as it played in small venues and then came Corona. The people who witnessed it live were blazingly enthusiastic, the press unanimously praising it and I, after attending the live stream, can't help but join that chorus of lofty fans, even if singing together is a bit tricky.

There were 6,000 of us yesterday, which is a lot for a small-hall performance in the Netherlands. Had it been television, the station manager would have had the broadcast stopped after only five minutes. But still: 6,000 people buying a ticket for a live stream is a lot. Especially when it is also quite complicated to watch in a comfortable way.

[Nerd mode .on.]I have a chromecast and it seems to work moderately well with the applied Vimeo on mobile, let alone an iPad, you really need Apple TV for that anyway. In the end, the laptop made a perfect wifi connection to the TV in the living room via chrome. Picture and sound were fine, although respectively too small and too soft for the truly immersive experience. You don't want to treat the neighbours to your evening of theatre uninvited.[Nerd mode .off.]

Tram and train

All that technical hassle to get into the theatre is then cancelled out by the alternative: cycling through the cold to Central Station, running to a train, driving to Amsterdam, catching a tram there and then awkwardly drinking coffee in the foyer, pushing past 30 people to find out that the woman in front of you has put her hair up a bit too high to have a good view. And then having to do the same thing in reverse afterwards to get home late.

We used to call that an outing, now it is something we partly yearn for, but on the other hand are terrified of, because Corona.

No TV

Incidentally, the quality of the livestream experience is adequate but not a substitute for the real thing. The makers had not tried to make TV out of it, and to their credit, because you are guaranteed to lose that. The question is also whether people without too much theatre experience would like such a thing, because they don't know what they are missing in terms of breath, air, smell and atmosphere of the real live thing. And those are quite important in theatre. We experienced theatre viewers think all that in and think away anything that doesn't look like Neflix.

Come to think of it, every subsidised theatre (company) in the Netherlands should make the livestream option standard. Your reach grows, that's something already. Whether it replaces the real thing? Certainly not, you might even wonder if a bad livestream is not worse than not playing at all. Last week I saw a miasmic attempt by a literature festival to replace the already never very flashy live experience with a studio where someone talks to a monitor. Would have been better not done. It listens closely.

Well TV

In mid-February, ITA will bring a live stream of the hit 'Roman Tragedies'. When it premiered years ago, in 2007, it was a revolutionary experience: live television in the theatre, and the play has only gained currency with recent developments across the various seas and oceans. If I were me, I would go and watch it. It does take a couple of hours. That's long, but you get to make coffee and eat in the meantime. I dare you.