There is nothing wrong with just being really good at what you do. Nothing better than a single artist on an empty floor with nothing but their music, body and voice. The top three of my legendary art moments:
- David Bowie sings Heroes on an empty stage at Rotterdam's Kuip stadium (1983).
- Frieda Pittoors in almost every role from 'Kras' onwards at Discordia (1987).
- Jacob Derwig as Dostoevsky's Gentleman in the Cutting Room of 't Barre Land (2000).
All old-school stuff, I admit, but that's it with top moments: once established, it's hard to knock them off the throne. Yet that is not impossible. Indeed, just below that top are two related moments: Ad de Bont's 'Mirad, a Boy from Bosnia' in a Zeeland schoolroom, spoken by Rob Vriens and Marieke van Weelden of Wederzijds. That was sometime in 1994, so also a long time ago, but last Friday I saw Victorine Plante and Rochelle Deekman playing Antigone in a rather desolate schoolroom for 50 sixth-graders of the Marnix Gymnasium.
Transformation
There I saw again the miracle that also struck me decades ago: it is precisely in that empty space, where all decoration is missing, where no fancy lighting and dazzling décor distracts attention, that you experience the magic of art best. Someone changes into something else without anything really changing. Transformation in its purest form, as fascinating as it is horrifying (for people who get pimples from everything 'trans' stands for).
That Antigone by Alum is rather laudatory reviewed, but I wanted to go and see how such a thing worked outside the safe context of a theatre hall with a festive theatre audience. In the former auditorium of the Marnix Gymnasium on Rotterdam's Henegouwerplein, the situation was desolate enough. The hall in the monumental building had not improved since I went to school there myself in the 1970s. Funnily enough, the sixth-graders did not seem to have changed either, but that may have been due to my nostalgic state of mind. It was Friday afternoon half past two, not the time when concentration is highest. Nothing in the room helped bring in exciting theatre.
Deeply sympathised
Yet in the end I experienced a performance in which everything fell so into place, creating a common atmosphere between the two actors and the 50 students that lingered long after. Nothing awkward teenagers in the contramine, which is in itself the subject of the 2,500-year-old play. Here was intense sympathy, every turn of the text followed and the subtlest acting movement noticed. I was touched again, and harder, by a text I had seen performed dozens of times.
Opportunism
Theatre group Aluin has been around since the early 1990s and has occasionally been subsidised by the Fonds Podiumkunsten, and occasionally not. On one of those occasions when they lost their subsidy, Victorine Plante told me in the car back to Utrecht, the company stayed afloat on performances sold to upper secondary schools. Director and writer/editor Erik Snel is devoted to the ancient Greeks, which makes his work ideally suited to schools where classical language and culture is taught. That Aluin aligns the repertoire with the compulsory final exam translations is then a convenient choice.
But opportunism alone will not get the club there. They can only keep a Medea version from 2013 in the repertoire if it is rock solid, and gets the best professional performance. As happened now with Antigone.
Persuasion
All fifty-one of us in that chilly Rotterdam hall suddenly understood again why a text can still be alive and kicking after 2,500 years. We understand that Sophocles wrote just as much about Trump, Putin and Marjolein Faber as about forgotten mayors of Athens. Precisely because it is about a mythical regent of a city long since reduced to ruins.
Just reading or reciting will not get you there. As an actor, you have to master the art of transformation to perfection. So well that you need nothing but your body, your voice, your conviction to bring the world in with 50 adolescents in a chilly room.
I see such bare and pure theatre too rarely in our real theatres.
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