Rumours are true: theatre can tap new audiences through local roots. Head to Enschede to see it.

Before, when I used to write about theatre for a national morning paper, my travel schedule was partly determined by the reach the paper had in a particular region. So, if I necessarily wanted to write about a theatre performance in Enschede, about Enschedean conditions, my chef's question was: how many subscribers do we have in Twente? So usually it didn't come to that. Unless I had a good story and the budget hadn't run out yet.

Viewing figures, now topical again because of the Matthijs van Nieuwkerk affair, are also decisive for 'old' media. This automatically means that the Randstad is more often visited by arts journalists than those parts of the Netherlands that are more than half an hour away by train. Like Enschede.

Timetable

Thus, due to their freelance status, most actors do not live in Enschede, but in Amsterdam. Most artists create their performances for Amsterdam. The newspapers and other media write about Amsterdam. Subsidies take Amsterdam art as the benchmark for what is eligible. So all this has very banal causes, which are suspiciously related to the NS timetable.

I am writing this article on the 10 pm 16 train from Enschede to Utrecht. my visit to Twente concerned the latest instalment of a remarkable theatre series entitled Huize Enschede. Which was launched via a submitted press release described in jubilant terms on Culture Press as a unique project that managed to appeal to totally new audiences. I saw the first three episodes on YouTube and that was reason enough to go and watch the final episode.

The somewhat overly jubilant press release turned out to be justified. In De Kleine Willem, the remaining Kleine Zaal of the former Enschede Schouwburg, beer was sold by the can. Wine came in plastic cups and the hall and foyer were full of real UT students, the kind you never really see in a theatre. Hardcore nerds, and according to typical Enschede folklore divided into 'houses'.

Not in their field of vision

They came not for a gala, but for the final episode of a particularly cleverly put-together soap opera that played out around a New Year's Eve party in one of those student houses: the special ones, which are divided into 12 cantons under the name SHE. Don't ask me about the details, they are part of Twente university folklore.

So you won't see a piece on that in the Randstad region very soon, and that's quite a miss. This four-part series attracted a growing audience with each episode, and was sold out until the dernière. The students I speak to afterwards are all more than enthusiastic. They never went to the theatre, it was not in their field of vision, but because a story was now being told about their world, they were triggered. Whether they will buy a ticket for an Ibsen, as one of the actors wondered, is not so important to me. More important is whether the next performance manages to build a bridge to them again.

With us in the West, how often do you see theatre that touches you because it is directly about what your world is? It happens in the better youth theatre, but after that it's often still an intellectual chasm you have to bridge to make an evening of theatre really land.

God in Rotterdam

I thought back to what once won me over, and then - apart from a Japanese samurai version of King Lear by the late De Appel - it was the performance God by Rotterdam's Ro Theatre. The then young and wild duo Jos Thie and Antoine Uitdehaag had found an old waterworks hall outside the city, as the Rotterdam Schouwburg had been demolished. The show was a topical and heavily translated to Rotterdam by Barbara van Kooten of Woody Allen's only theatrical comedy. As a young Rotterdammer, in a wave of recognition, I was immediately captivated.

Years later, the same thing happened to me with the also already Rotterdam version of The Family, also a theatrical series about squatters and power of four episodes, which serves as a great inspiration for the Enschede series I saw now. By then, The Family was already a 20-year-old play by Lodewijk de Boer, and is sadly rarely remade. That fate will befall Huize Enschede too, even if some of the makers still dream of a remake in the Randstad.

Local rooting

What makes my trip to Enschede so useful, for myself, but hopefully also for you, is precisely that strength of locally rooted, professional theatre. Sure, we know the big shows like Hanna and Hendrik, Het Pauperparadijs in Veenhuizen and the Katoenserie in Almelo, where I previously wrote about. Local spectacle is well known, and suburban colleagues are still willing to get on the train or car for it.

This is different. The play is full of references to national current affairs, but also tackles, sometimes mercilessly, the reality of life in a student dorm, with a strict hierarchy, and an emotional abyss filled with pills, coke, beer and sex. Here perhaps lies a basis for that I have been dreaming of for some time: theatre, professionally produced by theatres, where production and presentation are in one hand, with deep roots in local culture, detached from suburban notions of what is good and beautiful. Because, what works in The Hague doesn't always do well on a 2-hour drive from The Malieveld.

How can we give that a chance? I'm going to look into that in the near future.

Good to know

The Enschede series will get a follow-up in spring.