The Chekhov moment you hadn't counted on.

The picture was a bit Da Vinci. At a long table they sat in beautiful light and it was about melancholy and menace. This was the scene of Last Supper at Amsterdam's De Balie debate centre on 1 February 2025. To crucify: some theatre groups I grew up with. 't Barre Land fraternally next to De Warme Winkel, Orkater next to Discordia, Ita next to Rast. They sat in front of an auditorium, not quite full of colleagues. The scripture reading consisted of a condensed summary of The Cherry Garden. That last play Anton Chekhov wrote, before he was to die in 1904. 44 years old, younger than most of the people in the room. 

They had all failed to get through the latest round of subsidies under the new arts plan, had exhausted all avenues of appeal. There was nothing left for them but to pick up the bullocks again, move to new places and leave the old servant behind in the locked house. 

Uncle Wanja?

The emotion was imaginable, the occasion sad enough. The underlying anger came out in the form of a constantly sputtering Neil Young biographer in the front row, who, like some kind of old Serebryakov, kept hammering on at the well-coming former state secretary Günay Uslu, who was just not responsible for all this misery. However, she was blamed for everything, like some kind of Jelena of Troy. 

But Serebryakov belongs in another Chekhov play. In his Uncle Vanya, it is the old professor who has just returned to his estate to sell it away under his lame cousin's rump. Because he needs the money for his latest masterpiece. Which should be ready in a fortnight, by the way.

Status Quo

The stream of the evening can be seen on De Balie's site and you can watch it. So it is a play in itself, but without the relatable irony of Chekhov himself. Yes, it is bad that a number of companies with little to criticise have been shot out of existence in full flight, but no one in the auditorium or on stage knew how to say otherwise. 

Or, yes, there needed to be art philosophers between politics and art to mediate and advise. Or people had to be given money for longer. In fact, everyone was asking for continuations of the status quo, which neatly stipulates that politics does not interfere in the content of art and artists assess each other's applications, all at the express request of the art world itself. But with more money and permanent security for those once in.   

Throne

"Just knock me off the throne," it sounded around the turn of the millennium from the mouth of former young and up-and-coming talent Theu Boermans to the people of ´t Barre Land, when they were up-and-coming and Boermans was established. It was a Ruttian 'fight your way in as a minority', and the Barre Landers were rightly angry at the time. You can call it sardonic that they are in exactly the same position now, but let's stick to a painful irony of fate. 

It must also feel humiliating and powerless to sit there, declared old far too young by the self-desired subsidy system, and now forced to reinvent yourself and your craft. 'The artist's existence is simply unsafe,' Andrea Voets retorted, when she dared to speak at the very end as the only representative of the young and new guard that does now receive subsidies at the expense of the veterans on stage. 

Reason for a few attendees to mention the war, without immediately running into the shelter. Someone still called out that maybe they should admire themselves a little less. 

Every four years

Chekhov-enthusiasts can take heart from this evening, which will be able to be held every four years, with ever-new groups, as long as the government's budget for the arts does not continue to grow as exponentially as the number of art college graduates. 

In the Cherry Garden, it is the former serf Lopachin who devises a rescue plan for the languishing Cherry Orchard, while the landowner Lyubov hustles her money through on the French Riviera. Everyone identified so intensely with the entourage of that old landed gentry this evening that I developed vicarious sympathy for Lopachin, whom everyone in the room referred to with a dirty word as a 'property developer'. Everyone also thought the summer cottages he envisaged were so lacklustre. You could also think of all those poor people who would now have a roof over their heads.

More distance

This was an evening without self-mockery. Imaginable, but you'd grant us a bit more distance. Also a bit more realism. The subsidy system is creaking, it could be better, but once in, your place is not guaranteed, and the whole sector has fought rock hard for that since the last war. As a result, it could be finished every four years. Or you won't have to admit anyone from now on. 

There was also some sputtering about 'tick boxes' without mentioning the word 'diversity' or 'inclusion', because that is sensitive. So it is inevitable that - under pressure from all those appeals and objections from the sector itself - applying for funding will take on increasingly formal and bureaucratic edges. And we want a diverse and inclusive society, don't we? Musk is not yet in power here.  

Big Capital  

How to do things differently? We need to agree on that, before something like Musk's coup in the US happens here too. The end of the subsidy is always hanging over your head, so always prepare for that moment. This is not a surrender to big business, but a necessary strengthening of your personal resilience. And if you do have to fly (don't have to), fly with the airline of the young woman who was so utterly unjustly constantly harassed by that screaming Serebryakov in the front row. 

And then on the next occasion, don't read The Cherry Garden or Uncle Vanya, but dare to put Chekhov's play-within-a-play Seagull on the table. In which a young actress is crushed between the ambition of a young playwright and the crushing arrogance of an old writer.