I have rarely gone to a Holland Festival performance with such a fresh sense of reluctance as I did this time. Even more rarely have I returned from a Holland Festival performance feeling as happy, cheerful, joyful and intellectually enlightened as I did from Brecht’s First Play, on Thursday 18 June 2026. His reluctance stemmed from the fact that the play *Baal*, an early work by Bertolt Brecht, the great theatrical innovator of the 20th century, is an unpalatable monstrosity of a play, with a nasty title role portraying an artist who crosses boundaries, sketchily drawn supporting characters, cringe-inducing misogyny and a stupid, outdated view of humanity.
On top of that, the play was produced in China by Irish theatre makers, with funding from the Holland Festival, which led me to suspect nothing less than a sinister plot by the Chinese government to extend the New Silk Road all the way to Amsterdam’s Leidseplein through a charm offensive even worse than TikTok. As if they weren’t already up to their ears in censorship over there, with their loathing of Western democracy!
Valid questions
In short, I didn’t understand a thing, and – rather cheekily – I jotted down all these pent-up questions beforehand on the Chinese producer’s notepad; I’d been introduced to him by a good friend from Germany on the terrace of the building whose name had been changed by someone we never speak of anymore. The extremely friendly man burst out laughing. “Those are very valid questions,” he said, “but let’s have a chat afterwards; I’d love to hear what you thought of it.”
The performance began at half past eight. At five past half past eight, I was sitting in my seat looking at the stage, feeling an interesting mix of bewilderment, happiness, stifled laughter and deep admiration. And there were still nearly two hours to go, during which all those emotions would only intensify. What had happened?
Offensive content
Describing the miracle does not do justice to the creative efforts of all those involved. In those first five minutes, incidentally, they did little else but repeat and answer all the questions I’d asked the producer beforehand. ‘Yes, it’s a dreadful play,’ they said. ‘Silly characters too, bizarre misogyny, wooden dialogue? You said it; we know it. It’s no longer fit to be performed.’.
And why on earth did we, two Irishmen, go to Beijing to stage this play? Well, for that very reason: Bertolt Brecht’s *Baal* is, in fact, a Chinese play. Because over there, they know all about how to deal with controversial content.
Because that’s what you do with rubbish plays: you either don’t perform them, or you try to turn them into something beautiful, as the BBC attempted to do in 1982 with David Bowie in the title role. That’s historical TV that’s historical above all else, because it’s never been repeated, although the EP featuring three of Bowie’s songs is still available to listen to. And while we’re on the subject of Bowie, the Chinese actors say, didn’t he have affairs with minors back in the seventies? Why on earth was he never cancelled?
Technically flawless
So that’s what this cancelling is all about, and they’re better at it in China than we are. Or so we’d like to think. Over there, you can bleep out words, but you can also simply remove people entirely. In Brecht’s *First Play*, this happens live on stage, right before your eyes. They’ve split the screen vertically in two. The bottom half is a stage painted blue with the real actors, the top half is the desired version, in which – using chroma key, familiar from your video-calling apps – a fictional world has been created in which the action is given context, and – indeed – the undesirable content can be edited out at will.
Technically, it’s flawless, without the showiness we used to associate with the multimedia productions of Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. The self-deprecating humour (also unheard of in that theatre) then adds an incredibly lovely layer of humanity: you hardly ever see that here. That deadpan is essential.
Much more exciting
In the title role, Baal is visible below as the star actor he is in China; above, he’s a collection of blocks, whilst the rest simply stand by. Or perhaps not, because how do you portray a rape scene in a culture where any form of nudity is strictly forbidden? By making it literally invisible to the eye. Much more suspenseful, too, incidentally.
At Brecht’s First Play Irish theatre makers Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel give you a profound sense of the art of omission. After the performance, Ben Kidd told me that it’s still nerve-wracking to wonder how the Chinese censors will react to the play. Nothing inappropriate happens; potentially disturbing text is audibly bleeped out, and yet everyone knows what it’s about – but how do you censor that? There’s a beauty in that which we’ve lost sight of somewhat in the Netherlands, where we’ve built a global reputation for our audacity and shamelessness.
Magic camera
The creators of Dead Centre and the Beijing Repertory Theatre So they were mainly a bit worried about us, the candid Dutch audience, who might all find it far too proper. But it wasn’t proper at all. The imagination lies in the auditorium, and in the minds of the audience. Things are constantly being censored there, especially our own missteps. And if not, we’ve always got the scapegoat, which we – burdened with our sins – can chase out into the desert on a feast day. And we call that Matthijs, Michael, Ali, or Marco. And sometimes – just for a moment – Johan.
When, at a certain point, the magical camera pans across the auditorium, that message becomes crystal clear – in a way that is even more Brechtian than Brecht himself could ever have dared to hope for.
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