"We really shouldn't have asked this of you." When you get that as a jury comment on your audition for drama school, you have done something horribly embarrassing. For her audition at the Arnhem School of Drama, Femke Halsema had prepared a monologue from Oriana Fallaci's novel 'One Man' about her lover, Greek resistance fighter Alexandros Panagoulis. How
How did Halsema come to that choice? Was it inspired by Apostolos Panagopoulos, the director who fled from Greece and worked with her in Enschede's youth theatre, where she conceived her love of theatre? Could be, and it might also explain the embarrassing display the audition apparently turned into.
Nude with candles
The charismatic Panagopoulos, at the time just made famous by a rather controversial adaptation of the biography of medieval mystic Hadewych, starring a naked Frieda Pittoors on a stage full of burning candles, might have put her on the trail of the Greek resistance hero about whom 'A Man' is about, and also given her some specific clues. Which thus turned out wrong.
It would have been interesting if this had been discussed in a bit more detail during the fifth episode of Zomergasten 2025. A failed audition like that can be quite corrosive. It had not left the later GroenLinks forewoman and current mayor of Amsterdam cold either. After that rejection in Arnhem, she spent some time looking for her turn, which she only found years later in studying criminology.
No other questions
What if she had been accepted at Arnhem? Talent she has in abundance. She would have ended up in the generation that would produce legendary groups like De Trust and 't Barre Land. Which starring role in which film would have made her, some forty years later, appear as a celebrated actress or director in Zomergasten?
Interesting thought, but a fearful suspicion occurs to me that interviewer Griet Op de Beeck would not have had any other questions for her than the ones she now posed to Mayor Femke Halsema.
How that feels
Week 5 of this arduous series of full-length interviews showed a heavy relapse from the writer who was supposed to be an interviewer. And that after that fascinating highlight from a week earlier.
What went wrong? It would not be neat to blame Op de Beeck for everything. It is also because, as a director, Femke Halsema is used to being 'in control'. There are topics she won't talk about, like anything to do with politics. Her rather tempestuous private life also needed to be left out of the equation. That might not leave much other than asking how that feels when riots break out between population groups in your city.
Halsema's choice of television excerpts did give rise to all kinds of interesting reflections, but Op de Beeck had too little LSD for that. And here we mean the Listening, Summarising and Questioning necessary for a good interview. Op de Beeck did listen, but her summary was also her own interpretation, after which further questioning amounted to asking for confirmation of that interpretation.
Between the lines
It occasionally produced a suddenly hardening look from Halsema, which quickly gave way again to the benevolent, open smile she excels at. And sometimes even that smile went wrong. That happened once when Op de Beeck was paying attention and saw Halsema smiling at the excitement over XR's actions. "I didn't control my face for a moment," Halsema replied, immediately revealing how hard it was working to keep the conversation in check.
So we have to make do at home with the information that stuck between the lines. A clip from VPRO's legendary 1989 series 'Closely and Desperately' was about what Jorge Semprun had to say about remorse for the betrayal of a friend in Buchenwald concentration camp.
Don't mention the war
The interview intersected with a conversation in which the philosopher George Steiner argued how power always leads to crime and even then linked that to his fear that after 2,000 years of oppression, the Jewish people could possibly also be seduced into evil if given power. So 40 years ago, Steiner had already figured out how the world would work today, but Op de Beeck limited a question about that to how it felt for Halsema herself to now sit at a desk with two phones, as a symbol of power.
Something like this might have been agreed beforehand (don't mention the war!), but it felt like a missed opportunity for an open goal.
Canta-ride
Another one of those far into the F-side swinging penalty we could witness when a pairing came along of the famous bicycle scene from Turkish Fruit and the Canta joyride from De Libi, in which three Moroccan boys actually do exactly the same thing as Rutger Hauer and Monique van der Ven, 40 years earlier.
It was occasion for the mayor to show how important it is to give young people the space to explore boundaries, but here, then, Op de Beeck could have pinned a ball in the right-hand corner with a question about that affair in which her 15-year-old was caught with a gun, something her then-husband ... enfin. It may all fall too much into the realm of RTL Boulevard or worse, but still: to cross is to head in.
Annoying questions
Another whole series of set-ups offered Halsema around actress Jane Fonda, who told how she actually always adapted to the men she was married to. Now, eighty and single, she could finally be herself. The beautifully played ball, which Op de Beeck only had to give a push to smash it unstoppable to match point, was of course about the men in Halsema's life and how she adapted to them. And how she looks back on that now, still far from eighty.
Then suddenly we would be back to Oriana Fallaci, that audition and that youth theatre in Enschede.
At the end, Griet Op de Beeck apologised to Femke Halsema for the "sometimes annoying line of questioning". Here an eyebrow went up. What annoying questions?
