Heady 'Hamlet and Ophelia' about Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious

I saw Sid Vicious perform with the Sex Pistols at the illustrious Eksit in Rotterdam in 1977, more than 45 years later my teenage daughter toured Vicious's story in International Toneel Amsterdam's performance Hamlet and Ophelia. She still has a life to go, I immersed myself in memories.

A (too long) retrospective

According to the annals of the magnificent Delpher-archive (NRC article with photo), the Sex Pistols visited Rotterdam on 14 December 1977. What I remember was hours of waiting in the cold, and when the gates opened and the foursome were finally on stage, barely able to play. That's how jet-lagged they were. Not Sid Vicious anyway, as he rarely made much of it live, given his cocktail of drinking and drug use.

Het Vrije Volk, Rotterdam's retired newspaper, spoke of a "legendary concert". Singer Johnny Rotten mainly kept himself busy with swearing, spitting and nose-emptying at the audience, Vicious with physical violence. "War remains to the end. The audience, coming from far and wide, gets into a fight with the Hell's Angels...Rows roll over. Hysterical fans panic as a result, trampling each other, tearing each other's clothes off. The atmosphere does not improve.

Sid Vicious in particular challenges the audience by kicking the overhanging bodies with his boots...No one notices when Sid Vicious slowly drops his bass guitar, like a percussion weapon, with a slap to a fan's neck. And does so again and again. Until the fan, regaining his senses, flies Sid at the throat like an agitated animal. Four Hell's Angels kick and punch him back into the crowd that has now also found its weapons..." After less than an hour, the war is over, 0 dead and a few seriously injured. A gig at Paradiso is cancelled to avoid a stampede of punks

Pogo 'dancing'

Eksit offered a series of punk groups that we attended with a regular group of about 10 friends from our village's blues club De Rotonde. Weed along and if each one fetched a metre of beer we - shy boys - were in a stupor in time. In the backyard, I burned holes in a T-shirt, unencumbered by curling parents, they let me freely enjoy the teenage years. Tangible memories of the punk era hardly remain, no selfies with Mr Rotten, purely a stack of vinyl LPs and snippets of lyrics such as last year's ever-surprisingly unaccountable memory yet frequent "God save the queen...an her fascist regime" at all the attention to British royalty.

But I had smoothly forgotten the word 'pogo' for the punk dance, but picked up yesterday at the Toneelschuur in Haarlem at the beginning of Hamlet and Ophelia: jumping straight up and down where you stand. It was that simple, but when you 'danced' the Pogo by the hundreds, the floor of Eksit moved with it.

Eksit went bankrupt, punks became good homebodies and watched Sid Vicious (Arne Luiting) modelled on the blonde Johnny Rotten and Nancy Spungen (Laura de Geest) with curly wig yesterday with many youngsters in the playhouse. Both drench their lives in drugs and booze, ending in blood, one at the very beginning of the show, the other at the end. Debbi Oskamp's dramaturgy, set design, lighting, video, photography, it all adds up during this performance of hallucinations, destructive living and bigotry with death until it brings redemption.

Oh yes, the review...

Young director Matteus Staniak took the text of The Hamlet Machine from Heiner Müller and concocted an analogy between the lives of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, Hamlet and Ophelia. All this is set in a room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where Spungen was found dead in 1978, possibly killed by Vicious. A cliché is added in the form of exploitation of grief by an opportunistic (Sex Pistols) manager 'Malcolm' (Pepijn Korfage) and his camerawoman Lee (Robin Zaza Launspach).

So my daughter was introduced to the fierce raw life of the punk era, which, incidentally, father had experienced mainly because of the music, or what was supposed to pass for it. Spent another night at the Chelsea Hotel later, but by then it was already past glory.

She knows more about Hamlet and about Ophelia, about the secondary school that, during subjects like Greek, Latin, English and Social Studies, fortunately still finds room for culture in the busy curriculum. (Now that the, say, obvious intelligence is produced with computers, schools may be able to do more about creativity and culture.)

To tell the truth, our conversation afterwards was hardly about Hamlet and Ophelia. I quite understand that as a young 'experimental director' at an eminent company like ITA, you want to justify yourself 'on level'. But whatever pretentious ground you come up with, in the end it comes down to good theatre and probing the boundaries between reality and imagination.

The director himself on that essence in Hamlet and Ophelia: "Sid Vicious was said to be an idiot and Hamlet is often labelled a madman. What fascinates me is how a truth is created...How does dying young of cult heroes contribute to maintaining their image? What truth do we construct of ourselves? If we tell the same story long enough, does it become our reality?...If we cannot live in reality, where do we want to flee to?"

So we watched this play by Staniak for Toneelschuur Productions, with all our memories of, and questions about, the harshness of life. For the most part, we found it good and entertaining, with powerful actors. However, bringing the rawness credibly to the stage is not easy. The play lacks a few strings at times, perhaps from the punk music to alternate too broadly spun scenes.