At Giselle Vienne's L'Etang, I feel again what I have been missing all this time.

England is closed. The culture minister happily reports that artists can tour Europe again, as long as they do not go outside Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.

We've always taken an ambitious approach in negotiations on touring artists, including in my meeting with @AbidRaja last month.

Delighted that our new trade deal with Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein will allow musicians, performers and support crews to tour easily there. pic.twitter.com/oUSt6EPM4J

- Oliver Dowden (@OliverDowden) June 4, 2021

It is only natural that France, as the cultural hub of Europe, is once again in the spotlight. With good reason too, of course, because its language is beautiful and its history rich. So it is nice that northern French-born Giselle Vienne is now associate artist of the Holland Festival. On Saturday 5 June, I saw her version of Robert Walser's only play, the one-act 'Der Teich' (the pond, l'etang) and was deeply impressed.

98 places

Now there was more to be impressed by, as it was my first introduction to theatre after the lockdown. The Amsterdam Rabozaal, good for 800 seats in earlier times, was rigidly sold out with 98 seats. The empty seats had not been removed and replaced with nice tables or otherwise filler things that would make it something normal, so the emptiness was too noticeable. A pity, because we are probably going to have to get used to it.

It did not take away from the fact that Giselle Vienne's performance of the mini-play about a little boy simulating a drowning to test his parents' love, enlarged to the full width of the auditorium and supported by nice palpably loud music, hit the mark. She only needs two actors for this and a lot of French.

Solid

L'Etang is a sentimental melodrama with a far too happy ending. As far as that is concerned, no reason to perform it, but Vienne manages to turn it into high art. She does so by marvellously expanding the enormous melodrama in language, but making the actors stonewall in movement. All told, the two actresses cover perhaps 30 metres in an hour and a half. The movements are tremendously slowed down, which works beautifully with the sometimes frenzied lyricism of the language.

In a previous century, one of the founding fathers of modern French theatre, Ariane Mnouchkine, already showed what that produced. She combined French-classical bombast with extremely stylised minimal gestures, and thus even Racine became fun to watch again. Vienne does it more soberly, but also much more intensely. Because watching theatre is something you also do with your body, the freezing of the actors becomes something enormously exciting, a thriller effect you feel in your toes as a spectator.

For this, I came back to the theatre and braved the mouthy entertainment crowd on the train to Amsterdam. This theatre is an experience unmatched by any stream, no goggle-eyed Netflix series. Theatre should be felt.