The less real theatre is, the better it works. That insight dawned on me again this weekend, in Utrecht's Stadsschouwburg. Twice, in fact. Friday with the reprise of Aluin's Twelfth Night, Saturday with Koning Krump, the masterpiece by Het Nut. Two Utrecht groups, once sprung from the same theatre school, and drunk in the same theatre cafe, where...
A festive wedding about death From 9 May to 2 June, NUT (Nieuw Utrechts Toneel) plays its 11th summer performance on location in Utrecht Leidsche Rijn: Forever and ever and ever and ever. Theatre-makers Greg Nottrot and Floor Leene stage their own wedding, assisted by musician Pascal van Hulst and directed by Maurits van den Berg. For...
Utrecht - With the performance Good Gold Money, theatre maker Greg Nottrot (artistic director of the NUT) managed to raise €101,332.80 from his audience this spring. This production was received with high praise by both the press and the audience and responds to that strong feeling that ''something has to change'' from both the creator and the audience...
In Anton Chekhov's legendary play 'Seagull' (1896), the young, ambitious playwright Konstantin shoots a seagull. It is a symbolic act, giving 'wings' to his desperate love for the young actress Nina. On 29 June 2023, the no longer very young (40) actor, writer and storyteller Greg Nottrot stops every now and then to...
Utrecht, March 2023 - Theatre producer and actor Greg Nottrot, artistic director of the NUT (Nieuw Utrechts Toneel), will create and perform this summer's show Good Gold Money. Theatre about inequality, excess and the discomfort and necessity of money. The performance can be seen at Oerol Festival on Terschelling from 9 to 18 June and from 28 June to...
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.
On the day that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the world's Facebook, announced his launch to the 'Metaversum', in order to trounce his collegatechies Bezos, Musk and Branson, who had only had a little sniff of the Universe, I attended the performance 'Never work again' by the Nieuw Utrechts Toneel in Utrecht Leidsche Rijn. In these times of lockdown and...
Ok, the Mauerpark in the real Berlin is more grubby, but what they call the Berlinplein in Utrecht's new Leidsche Rijn centre has something in common with it. Of course, a frayed edge organised by the local government is a bit suspicious, with a megabios as its biggest attraction, but property developers, the biggest abusers of artistic frayed edges, can't do much else on...
'I did get startled at first by being so laconic under the lockdown. I thought: don't I care enough to step over it so lightly? I also fully understand that people are very sad that it's all off, but apparently I'm a bit more fatalistic about that.' Greg Nottrot, playwright and enigma maker,...
There has been quite a bit going on about borders, lately. That is what authors Floor Leene and Greg Nottrot have made a performance about, together with Wil van der Meer, Tijs Huys and Pascal van Hulst. Directed by Daniël van Klaveren, the Nieuw Utrechts Toneel (NUT) ensemble performs the play on the oldest border we know,...
Linda Huijsmans and Wijbrand Schaap catch you up in a good half hour on the backgrounds of the larger Culture Press News of the past few weeks. It's a bit more about the nude/nude situation in the arts, but of course it's also about money, that million that was drilled through the nose of performing artists by a row in the board of the Social...
'How many realities can we handle? For me, that is the theme of 2018. Those ladies from North Korea who were cheering, for example. But it was also in Halbe Zijlstra who had lied about Putin's dacha.' Greg Nottrot, theatre maker from Utrecht, had set out for this year to create an end-of-year performance that would capture the zeitgeist well....
The decision will be official in mid-September, but behind the scenes it has already been made. The Netherlands will have a very small basic cultural infrastructure for the performing arts, and a very large fund that anyone who wants to make theatre, dance, mime or music must apply to. I asked around a bit recently, and so that's what it's going to be. That way, politicians can't...
'Can I ask you: do you know what time is?' Greg Nottrot's question cannot be straightforward, as I am the only spectator. MIjn spot is uncomfortable: a chair sinking into fresh gravel on the curious Utrecht plain christened 'Berlinplein' by city developers. I witness an early rehearsal of De Denderende Tijd. In that...
I held my heart. Patrick Nederkoorn and Oscar Kocken had been tempted by television to bring their brilliant gem 'Zomaargasten' over to the living room. NPO3 still. The channel targeting millennials. I had visions of channel managers, dramaturgs, audience specialists and gussied-up boys and girls well over forty that these two little artists would...
What is a memory worth? A first kiss, for example: how much poorer are you if it is forgotten? In hard euros. Such questions Greg Nottrot likes to ask his audience, and we, his grateful listeners, gladly join in his money thought experiments. The man who, with Oscar Kocken, came up with the revolutionary concept of the live talk show Order of the Day, now makes,...
The fastest, and most beautiful, way to cycle through Leidsche Rijn is along the Groenedijk, and then all the way to the end. Pedalling 20 minutes from Utrecht Central Station, there recently, and for 2000 years, lies Castellum Hoge Woerd. It is a newly built idea of a Roman fort that guarded the ancient border of the Roman Empire here, along...
I did it just like that. Proclaimed a show as the most important theatre innovation for 20 years. That's daring. Even though I made the term a bit more vague in a subsequent tweet, because, yes, there has been quite a lot of innovation in recent years, left and right in theatres. So let's stick to 'the last few years'. And then...
The press presentation of the open-air opera Orfeo ed Eurydice at Soestdijk at the time attracted just under a hundred people press and sponsors. At the presentation of the performance 'Much ado about nothing', The Utrecht Games attracted only a handful: someone from weblog cultuurpodium.nl, two people from the Stadsblad Utrecht and an indeterminate camera crew who had come exclusively for Suzan Visser....
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