Tryaters ‘Swimbad’ is well worth the trip to Bakkeveen

It is quite rare that I emerge from a theatre performance with a blissful smile. It happened to me the Friday before Pentecost in Bakkeveen, the village on the border triangle between Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe, where time has stood still in a special way.

Take the local outdoor swimming pool. This is still original from the days when the whole of the Netherlands was filled with such sites: a sunbathing lawn, a paddling, children's and sports pool, culminating in the three-metre diving board, all done in a slightly brutalist 1970s style.

Michelin stars

Almost everywhere, these pools have either gone bankrupt or have been replaced by sports centres with wave pool and shiny tube slide. Bakkeveen has one of the last outdoor pools in its original state, including a puny kiosk for Ola ice cream with lifeguard and a sunbathing area plus restaurant where they serve chips and schnitzel or satay. Those schnitzel and satay, by the way, taste good (there's also veggie offerings), but that's not why this venue deserves the highest Michelin rating. Those three Michelin stars are for Tryater, the theatre company that makes theatre exclusively for Friesland, in the Frisian language, for the province with its very own concept of community.

Tryater has traditionally had something of an old-fashioned amateur image to it. That this has been unjustified for years proves Swimbad, the performance with which they close the 60th anniversary year. Yes, there are dozens of locally recruited extras, but the way they participate in this performance is very special. The boys playing football on the sunbathing meadow, the children jumping off the diving board, the class of aqua jogging seniors and the not quite spacy group of synchronised swimmers: they are very naturally present in the sultry summer evening décor in which Joke Tjalsma shines as the narrator of a beautiful story about life.

Life stages

The other female guests, a young mother, a middle-aged woman in a wheelchair and a young girl with big ambitions are just there, but also serve to illustrate the life stages of the old woman that Tjalsma is now. Like the adolescent boy, the lifeguard, the absent husband and a physiotherapist with influencer ambitions: all very modern, nowhere disturbingly historicising, and only later do you realise that that adolescent girl's remark about how we are sixty per cent water and what an atomic bomb does to it is very much early eighties.

The writer who wrote this play about a fluid life deserves extra credit. Wessel de Vries, with dramaturge Nina Thunissen, has produced a text that leaves out so much that it is perfectly suited to Joke Tjalsma. Because Joke Tjalsma, that's an actress who needs very few words and even less voice coaxing to keep any audience glued to their seats.

Pleasant tranquillity

Everything about this performance exudes rippling life, without being rippling. An extraordinarily pleasant calm does descend on you, exactly what that comparison with life and water implies.

The biggest secret of concept and direction, in the hands of Tatjana Pratley and Aukje Schaafsma, is their realisation that performance on location is not just a design idea. That location itself plays a leading role, and what people usually do there is leading. This is also how, as a spectator, you start looking with a lifeguard's eye: 10 seconds at the water, 10 seconds at the sunbathing area, 10 seconds at the sides, 10 seconds at the diving board, and meanwhile never lose sight of that little girl walking too close to the deep end.

I previously saw such an overall concept only at very early performances of the illustrious Hollandia, sometime from the days when the first such pools had plastic sliding trunks. For a moment, I couldn't think of a bigger compliment.

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