With text, movement, actors, sets.
In the French-speaking world, everyone has read l'Étranger (The Foreigner) by Albert Camus. The 1942 book, which many Dutch people have also read, if only because it is nice and thin for the French reading list, tells the story of a white French resident of Algeria, a so-called pied-noir, who is so convinced of the absurdity of life that he becomes a...
In Flanders, or rather in its cultural capital, Antwerp, the theatre sector is faltering. The Toneelhuis, founded in the late 1990s as a merger between the legendary Blauwe Maandag Compagnie and city company KNS, is in crisis after the departure of Guy Cassiers. It is now losing more than half of its grant after a scathing opinion. The Flemish government is stopping...
'For me, the world of Wotan equals the world of Putin.' Christopher Ruping, director of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen to be shown in Amsterdam in June, makes no bones about it: 'Siegfried [central character of Wagner's monster production, ws] is a very problematic character. He kills the dragon without asking questions. We give the dragon...
The comparison with the Derksen affair cited in this article no longer holds true as of this date, as the TV personality has been restored to full glory by the television station that previously 'cancelled' him. From Monday 16 May, he will return to his old role as a 'grumpy old man' in Today Inside. See the link here.
Ok. One time I will say it. That Yara Piekema is the daughter of Harry Piekema. You know: that man who single-handedly gave that Zaanse Grootgrutter a human face. Harry was already a big one in Utrecht, and now it turns out he secretly, years ago, gave birth to an even bigger one: Yara Piekema, no longer the daughter of,...
On Good Friday, I, working for the Immigration and Naturalisation Service IND, attended the 100th performance of Solomon's Judgement at the Lourdes Church in Scheveningen. Wijbrand Schaap visited the confrontational theatre production in July 2021 and wrote back then about the perils of an asylum procedure at the IND. Where does the performance stand now? Just in a nutshell: in Salomon's Judgement, three actors do...
How beautiful art for children can be when a real artist is involved. When themes like death, falling in love, loneliness and exclusion are made palpable in such a beautiful way that you step outside with a deeper feeling about life? With theatre-maker Moniek Merkx, you can. A year ago, she stepped down as artistic director of...
That you are suddenly back in 1996 at Black Snow, the television series in which actress Tamar van den Dop managed to hook an entire generation of viewers at the time. Since then, her raven-black curls have turned into a dazzling cloud of silver, but those who go to the National Theatre's Distress trilogy suddenly see that young Tamar again. A miracle of talent in...
'For the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to play all the notes written by Chekhov. It was an intellectual and artistic challenge to really work with Chekhov. I could really let Chekhov be one of the authors of the play, which is very unusual for me. After all, I'm used to writing plays to...
What magnificent beauty of Dutch language from Tom Lanoye! What greatness of stage by Theu Boermans! What great acting by Romana Vrede, Mark Rietman and Myrthe Huber! Three hours of enjoyment at the very highest level that culture has to offer. And then the Koninklijke Schouwburg in The Hague is not even sold out on a Saturday night. Did the big...
We always want to do the best, but usually fail horribly. Whether this is our habitual way of thinking, or whether we owe that idea to Ovid, we will never know. We can, however, say that the literary work 'Metamorphoses', published by Roman Ovid in the first year of our era, is the single most influential book of the...
Which sentence stuck with us? The question to the audience comes from Madeleine Matzer after the performance of 'Smart'. It is a rather loaded question, as the play is about very direct loss. When a child has just died in a stupid accident, every sentence you remember is worth gold. The blunt accident that the subject...
Few actors can portray timidity as aptly as Jan-Paul Buijs. With his wonderful Circus Treurdier, he made a catchy performance that anyone who has something against big mouths should enjoy. Especially at chattering show tables and on Twitter, but also with the incessant smattering of columns in the Volkskrant; the big mouths of the betwetervolk exert a power you...
During the upcoming Makersdag on 7 March in Het Huis Utrecht, the Utrechtse Lichting will present themselves, a group of Utrecht theatre makers who graduated during the pandemic. The circumstances in which these makers had to take their first steps in the field were tough during corona time. HKU Theatre, Theater Kikker and Het Huis Utrecht are therefore jointly offering these theatre makers the opportunity to...
Susannah Elmecky and Emma Remmelts were in the third year of the Utrecht School of Theatre when Covid struck. Now they have both graduated and started careers on stage. In this podcast, they tell how they experienced the time of lockdowns. Also joining us is Victorine Plante, director of theatre group Aluin, where Susannah Elmecky is now playing a beautiful role in...
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz. Remember that name. A writer who left us only two books, and whose life history reads like a twentieth-century horror novel. He wrote, in 1939, three years before his death by a torpedo in the Indian Ocean, 'The Man Who Took Trains', under his English pseudonym John Grane. This book, published in 2018 in the original German...
Giving up a loved one poisons bodies, which then repel each other. Is there consolation for pain from cruelty? About a thousand children under 20 die every year, most of them babies. And 600 people die in traffic, thankfully far fewer than before, but more since 1945 than in the Holocaust. There are no collective commemorations for it, bereaved families often suffer in...
From this week, try-outs of Poison, about an ex-couple who lost a child, are playing. After the premiere on 19 February in Leiden, as many as 70 performances will follow throughout the country. Actor Stefan de Walle is ready for it. The wonderful play Gif by Lot Vekemans has been performed since its premiere in 2009 at NTGent under Johan Simons in 21...
We like to play by the rules. That's quite OK if you're driving through a historic city centre in a tractor or truck combination, for instance, but it gets tricky when the rules stop obeying themselves one day. The actors of the rather physical theatre group Bambie, Paul van der Laan, Jochem Stavenuiter and Tessa Jonge Poerink, have worked with...
A day like any other. Simply, on the road. To work. Going home. You know it. You know the road, the car, it's quiet. No oncoming traffic, virtually no side roads... You relax behind your dashboard. One of those days, then, like all kinds of others. Until that message, that moment... that changes everything. For her and for him and above all: forever. SMART is a...
With the performance Krant, Dutch playwright Joeri Vos of De Veenfabriek aims to criticise the major Belgian newspaper operators in the Netherlands. But it also paints an unflattering picture of journalism. Vos, he revealed beforehand, has serious concerns about the independence of news supply. After all, Dutch dailies such as AD, Telegraaf, Volkskrant and NRC, as well as many...
In terms of religion, we are badly off with a single supreme and omniscient god who is also Love. Theologians and philosophers have therefore been earning a fat living for a couple of decades explaining all the misery in the world where God is only love. No. Then the classical Greeks. With them, free will ruled. Not...
Sometimes I dream of a subsidy system where artists can actually carry out their wild plans all the way, to the extreme. Or, indeed, are obliged to do so. That, for example, if you make a musical, you actually have to put a live band on stage, and are not allowed to use a studio recording. And that you then have to pay money for that...
Dear Library South-Kennemerland, I would like to apply for the position of 'Culture & Social Domain Programme Manager' that you published on the 'Cultural Vacancies' website. You see, I am a huge supporter of the idea that a library should associate itself with books as little as possible. After all, the clouds of dust are already smelling you up. Of course, you also knew all along that a bookcase...
Pure panic and existential angst: that's the picture you get when you approach makers in the arts personally about the effects of trickle down (the trickle down of corona funding from the government to those makers). The Creative Coalition may be making a fist for them, talking to the minister about it, the institutes debating it, but the creators are silent....
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