With text, movement, actors, sets.
Assault and finally rape of a 14-year-old girl by a bonkers vet. An enjoyable evening at the theatre is different, until the applause of this arguably (once again) best Dutch theatre production of the year relieves you of the harsh struggle. Author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and director Ivo van Hove emphasise that both 49-year-old vet Kurt and his minion, the farmer's daughter, are heavily traumatised...
Sometimes you suddenly discover a gem of culture, banished from playlists by the tough theatre market. Like Wil van der Meer with his French chanson programme of translated songs by Annie Schmidt. As an actor, singer, director and teacher, Wil van der Meer is not first rate, but equally indispensable to Dutch culture. The countless, indispensable roles...
Jacqueline Blom and Mark Rietman immediately arouse laughter and sadness as desperate children of divorced parents at the beginning of Family Game. However, the sharp tragicomedy gradually becomes more of a farce good for an evening of laughter. In Family Play, Jacqueline Blom, Bas Hoeflaak and Annick Boer show their best side as actors, and I enjoyed the...
Grieving well for the loss of a loved one does not lead to Prozac or a shrink. On the contrary, a little life skill helps, as in 'Grief is the thing with feathers' by Max Porter, Jacob Derwig and Erik Whien. Once, after tragedy struck my family, I used to console myself by reading aloud the picture book Frog and the Little Bird by Max...
Director Alida Dors is pushing for inclusion at Theatre Rotterdam. What does this mean for a 44-year-old white director with great success with traditional audiences, as now with 'Sadness is the thing with feathers'? A Q&A. "Erik Whien's theatre is all about the human being. About the head and everything that happens in it. Every human being has thoughts, in the mind...
Before, when I used to write about theatre for a national morning paper, my travel schedule was partly determined by the reach the paper had in a particular region. So, if I necessarily wanted to write about a theatre performance in Enschede, about Enschedean states, my chief's question was: how many subscribers do we have in Twente? So usually it didn't get there
How do you get young people into your auditorium? Almost every theatre struggles with that question. Bran Remie (35), programmer and theatre maker at Wilminktheatre and Muziekcentrum Enschede, succeeds. With the online and offline theatre series Huize Enschede, about student life in that city. Students are hard to get to the theatre. Theatres do their best, with targeted marketing and special promotions...
Experience mime at the Zéro - Mime & Performance Festival: the first two-day festival in the Netherlands entirely devoted to physical and visual theatre. Expect new and established makers, location performance alongside large hall productions, comforting alongside abrasive, inside and outside de Meervaart 15 and 16 December 2022. Including turboslapstick performance Knock-Out and Erosion, winner of the BNG Bank Theatre Prize. The...
Marietje d'Hane Scheltema, her name be praised. How corny I used to think she was with her neat little rhymes with which she managed to transform classical Greek and Roman drinking bouts into Kralings-judged bake sale parties. And how wrong I could be. Because how well her translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses works in the hands of the people at Alum. Yesterday was the premiere...
Squeezing village society and family, escape with harsh deflowering, student pleasures crushed by bloody abortion, inescapable marriage and childbearing, scorching relationships with men, fierce longing with loneliness, and finally resignation with grandchild; against the backdrop of war, reconstruction, stifled revolution, years of hope and finally in prosperity and cynicism extinguished idealism. Time flows through Annie, Annie flows through the...
In this bleak everyday reality, Theatre Group Alum gives you the opportunity to escape to Ilyria, where audiences will be immersed in a world of romance, music and gender fluidity. From 21 to 30 December, this sneaky queer party takes over Theatre Kikker. Shakespeare Twelfth Night was written by William Shakespeare as a sneaky Queer party within the norms of the seventeenth...
Light is the name of the latest production by NUT, a theatre company with close ties to Utrecht's Leidsche Rijn district. It is theatre in a bubble in Utrecht's largest city park, and it starts with good food and drink. I went to see it, and again became even more of a fan than I already was. A few reasons, why that came about.
Jeroen Spitzenberger lets New Rotterdam Jazz Orchestra shine So typically Rotterdam is this performance, just right, because of the space the lauded actor grants to a rather unknown 11-member male orchestra. For weeks, we happily watch Spitzenberger as Tim in the excellent TV series Oogappels, just as we intensely enjoyed The Year of Fortuyn at the same NPO in which he (also)...
'I have a special relationship with my stuff. It has to do with certain emotional experiences in my life.' With "The Spot Where I Find Myself", Genevieve Murphy (Scotland, 1988) breaks new ground in exploring her potential as a composer, musician, but above all, a theatrical performer. Those who have been following Murphy for a few years have already noticed her versatility,...
We die too late. Most of the time. After all, nobody wants to spend the last years of life leaking in a nursing home, cared for by ever-changing staff who do their stinking best but are incapable of the love that children, or close friends for want of it, could give. Better a pill than dementia, we say, but then you have to say 'Yes!
On 8 October 2022, ILFU will organise the Night of Poetry in Utrecht for the 39th time already. It is almost sold out which means that two-thirds of the cost is borne by visitors. "The night costs roughly 100,000 euros. If we sell out, the vast majority of the revenue already comes from tickets and about a third...
Light design central in new performance by the NUT | Di 4 October 2022 - Utrecht In collaboration with SHIFFT, the NUT presents the visual theatre spectacle Light, in which light design is central. Light is the extraordinary story of lighting designer Uri Rapaport who goes through life blind for a fortnight after surgery on a tumour on his eye. Theatre-maker Greg Nottrot takes him...
Stop or keep going until you drop dead? And can you build on the other? Serious life questions that the occasional duo Peter Blok and Bas Hoeflaak will answer from a trapeze on the ridge of their circus, joking and snarking. The dry humour and mugshots of Peter Blok (experienced stage, film and TV actor) and actor-cabaret artist Bas Hoeflaak (Snipers) are...
Saying sorry seems to be difficult, if the songs about it are to be believed, and if we measure the time it takes Dutch governments to do it. But sorry is also very easy, if you consider how often you are not pushed aside in the queue for something or other, after the word 'sorry' has sounded behind you, or -...
Ik zeg toch sorry a theatre production by Theatre Group Aluin and Raymi Sambo Makes about Keti Koti, the day celebrating the (official) abolition of slavery, will be shown in Dutch theatres from the end of September. At a time when more and more municipalities and organisations are openly apologising for the slavery past or letting their own role in this period be...
Shabnam and Theatre Group Aluin meet as part of her directorial internship on the performance I say sorry. Aluin considers it important to give young people with an interest in text theatre the opportunity to develop as autonomous creators. Being able to create alongside your writing can be a great added value. This residency gives Shabnam...
There is at least one reason to go see Porca Miseria, Trajal Harrell's latest work. The Holland Festival hosts the American choreographer best known for his Vogueing work this weekend, and the soundtrack to his trilogy is nothing short of stunning. Starting with Willie Nelson and ending with the Lamento della Nimfa with which Claudio Monteverdi...
If humanity goes extinct, there has been a woman somewhere who was the last not to have a child. To whom does that honour belong? At the Holland Festival, an ensemble of 12 performers now perform a requiem for that last non-mother. Actress and singer Joy Wielkens is the extraordinarily disarming high priestess in this at times quite heavy evening, in which the end of...
It shows either enormous guts, or boundless naivety, to make a musical in which a slave trader in Africa is converted by a song to a life of love and respect for fellow human beings. Yet Yemandja, the play that was performed in a setless performance at the Holland Festival, is actually just that. I could also explain...
From Thursday 1 to Sunday 11 September 2022, the Nederlands Theater Festival will show the finest productions of the past theatre season. The Netherlands Theatre Jury, headed by jury president Hadassah de Boer, selected the 12 most impressive theatre productions of the moment. Today, the jury announced its selection. Ten of the twelve productions from the selection can be seen during the upcoming edition of the festival....
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