You tell the best story by putting your audience on the edge of their seats right from the start. Using well-chosen fragments, Liesbeth Zegveld managed to build a story in which the climax stunned everyone. Even the excellently prepared Margriet van der Linden was listening at the moment suprême with eyes like saucers and her chin slumped on her chest. Fabulous television and a wonderful comeback of the longform interview programme that many people had given up on.
Was it the Olympics that threw a spanner in the works? Viewer fatigue, a boycott by Theo Maassen fans, or disappointed Adriaan van Dis supporters? In any case, there was suddenly a lot of buzz about the regular programme for 'our kind of people' and the people who like to comment on it. Zomergasten would run out of steam, and the stopgap solution with changing interviewers was the last push it needed. After all, Zomergasten was also a kind of sport: one interviewer, who had to dissect a different guest each time for six weeks in front of a critical audience that then liked to spend hours chatting about what was on offer.
250 viewers
I did not see all the episodes, because viewing-wise I was elsewhere. When Joris Luyendijk threw in his seven checkmarks for a story with Palestinian photographer Sakir Khader, I sat with 250 people in the Bossche Verkadefabriek deeply impressed by Lebanese dancer and choreographer Omar Rajeh. At Theatre Festival Boulevard, he created an unforgettable performance about the impossibility of art in a city divided to the bone.
During Janine Abbring's Summer Guest Night with Garrie van Pinxteren, I read with some friends a play by Hala Moughedine, not entirely coincidentally also from Lebanon, a country with a rich cultural tradition.
So on Sunday 18 August, there was time for Liesbeth Zegveld and Margriet van der Linden. And Liesbeth, praised and hated for her defence of victims of genocidal violence, unfortunately also committed or enabled by Dutch politicians and military, had a crazy story ready for us. That story was about her work, of course, but ultimately it was about her freedom as a woman.
Clint Eastwood
That revelation came by 10.30pm, after two memorable hours in which she had made perfectly clear how committed she is, and how necessary her work is. Margriet van der Linden, until then a pleasant interlocutor and excellently prepared interviewer, announced a feature film excerpt from 'The Bridges of Madison County', the wonderful love story starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood. Van der Linden seemed to see it as an amusing sidestep, but Zegveld responded with a sigh.
What followed was the kind of confession of a long-kept secret that many a follower of Zomergasten has longed for all those broadcasts. But this outpouring, in which Zegveld suddenly broke free as a super-loving person, someone who had found freedom after a life that seemed to unfold neatly predictably, was of a power I have never experienced all these years.
Margriet van der Linden was genuinely baffled by the revelation that Zegveld had found a new all-consuming love, for which she had left husband and children, and who had now made her overjoyed.
Life-changing
Everything was suddenly completely different. There followed another excerpt in which the UN court issued a final warning to the government of Israel. She reacted full of anger but resigned to what she nevertheless saw as a defeat of the international rule of law. And that resignation was followed by an excerpt from Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, in which Emma Thompson plays a middle-aged woman who has not had an orgasm all her life, something she confessed to a gigolo she invited for a night.
With this, Zegveld hinted at a sexual liberation that had happened to her, giving her a different outlook on her life. Perhaps also with a little less hard work, it seemed. "What happens if we all do what we feel like doing?" asked Zegveld earlier that evening, after an excerpt from Fanny and Alexander. "Does the economy collapse then? I don't think it will. But then you have to know what you want first."
The story had come full circle. The inspired lawyer made a choice. Margriet van der Linden wished her guest 'many orgasms'. This highlight of this series of Summer Guests gives every reason to do so.
The question remains: how would this episode have gone with Theo Maassen as host? Fortunately, we will never know. In #Zomergasten 2023#6 guest, Alida Dors, asked the best questions. ACTUAL - Culture Press
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