Quite a lot has changed over the past 55 years. You can see this most clearly when a new generation tries to imagine what things you remember well from the past look like to them. Jatti, the rock musical currently playing in Hengelo, offers a great opportunity for boomers to get a reality check, whilst today’s youth can also learn a thing or two about how things used to be: sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll – without social media or ecstasy, but with cannabis, LSD and heroin. And mopeds that didn’t need locking up to keep them from being nicked.
According to the people behind Theaterproducties Twente, the Fashion Youth Centre in Hengelo was, for a long time, the only stronghold of hippie culture between Amsterdam and Berlin. I’m quite willing to believe that. The Open Youth Centre Tolkin – or was it ‘Talk-Inn’ – in the neighbourhood where I grew up, came along a bit later. It was also something of a counterbalance to Dancing La Bomba, where, incidentally, fights broke out involving knives and guns.
Huge factory hall
The consensus was that everything was a bit of a mess and nothing was in one piece. All this to foster a sense of conviviality. How do you stage something like this in a gigantic factory hall, a relic of the textile industry in a city that, in 1971, was revelling in the decline of that industrial glory of yesteryear? It worked out rather well, although the enormous scale of the production did mean that the grubby, shabby squalor of the original was lost to some extent. A production like this needs a large audience to survive, and so doesn’t have the luxury of giving *Jatti* the intimacy one might actually hope for.
That intimacy has now been swapped for spectacle, and it’s working out rather well. The band, which we finally see emerge from behind the scenes after a rather lengthy introduction, is delightfully rough-and-ready; the dancing is convincing; and the vocals are sufficiently stripped back to allow a hint of that unpolished rawness – so inextricably linked to the seventies – to shine through. Although, if you ask me, it could do with being a bit grittier and dirtier, the hair a bit less combed, the movements wilder.
Jatti, Superstar
But Jatti’s story is fascinating. He was a wayward lad who paid for his transgressive behaviour with his life, but whose body was never found. People have confessed, people have been convicted, and the scars are still palpable in the city. That is why *Jatti* is also an interesting musical: because the subject matter is more painful than it is a cause for celebration.
Not ‘Jatti, Superstar’ – that Jatti. Rather, a crime drama in which nobody comes across in a favourable light. Nor does the musical feature any real heroes you can go on a journey with, or cry alongside. Quite ‘Brechtian’: a production that doesn’t let you dream, but does make you think. The same applies to the set design, which, using simple means, is primarily functional rather than realistically atmospheric.
So it was down to the actors, and they manage it quite well, alongside the band. Special mention goes to Mingus Dagelet, who turns the character of Jatti into a fine Jim Morrison: more devilish than saintly, and a creditable drummer to boot. He alone is reason enough to make the trip to Hengelo. And if, due to a lack of trains (which were playing up this weekend), you end up travelling by car, do watch out for that one bump on the motorway, just outside Hengelo.
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