Paul Knieriem on his Hamlet for Amsterdam youth: 'Here you feel what representation and recognition does to a room'.

Wijbrand Schaap

Paul Knieriem, you're a director at the Toneelmakerij and you did Hamlet.

Paul Knieriem

We made a very free adaptation. We more or less used the dramaturgy, the characters and the plot. At the same time, Abdelkader Benali has really also written a text of his own, albeit with references to and quotes from Shakespeare. So it also became a new, different text.

Wijbrand Schaap

I had gone to see your theatre in Amsterdam West in a heartbreakingly interesting fray near Sloterdijk station. Suddenly it turns out there's just an outlet for beer bikes.

Paul Knieriem

And it has a big Turkish wedding centre. And house parties are held there. It's hip and happening there, I can tell you.

Wijbrand Schaap

I was quite enthusiastic about the performance, but I was dealing with a kind of generation thing in my head. not that the generation thing was at play in the auditorium, because I think the audience was extremely enthralled. It's for high school students. What approximate age is the target audience?

Paul Knieriem

We said twelve plus, so from the first, second grade of high school. But there are also fifth- and sixth-graders among them. Basically from vmbo to grammar school.

Wijbrand Schaap

I won't read out my entire review, it's just on the site culturalpressbureau.nl. I promised a conversation with Abdelkader Benali and the director. Well I am talking to one of the makers: Paul Knieriem, the director.

The other creator, Abdelkader Benali, is indisposed. We saw a tweet from him come along, from an hour ago, that he was harassed on the street by a gentleman who thought he shouldn't edit Hamlet. Because that man wasn't allowed to wear dreadlocks either. It was really the reason. Surely that's not an average practical educated person, because he did talk about cultural appropriation, so think that must have been perhaps a parent of one of the visiting school classes. Surely you must know the word cultural appropriation then.

Paul Knieriem

Surely that alone is reason enough to make this piece?

Wijbrand Schaap

In preparing for this podcast, I also found out that there is a Hamlet adaptation in America, on Broadway, right now, written by a Black writer. Who has just won a Pulitzer Prize. It's called Fat Ham. So the protagonist's name is not Hamlet, but Juicy, and the play is set at a 'southern' barbecue. I suspect a Dutch company has already tried to get the rights, as it is becoming a world hit in America. A bit of a Hamilton category, I believe.

In a promo video, the author, James Ijames says he owes nothing to Shakespeare because he has been dead for a long time. That was also the underlying question for my story: how far would you want to go with Shakespeare? How far should you go with Shakespeare and when are you going to call it Shakespeare anymore? Or wouldn't you much rather seek total freedom and write a fierce play about Amsterdam West?

Paul Knieriem

This performance started with a conversation between Abdelkader and me. That was five years ago. Abdelkader and I were paired up by Kees Blijleven of de Krakeling. In that conversation, we talked about what inspires us. For him, that was the Theatre Company's Hamlet. It had always stayed with him. I had also been fascinated by that play for some time: why is it so good or why is it so well-known or what is the thing about Hamlet?

I also saw it once at my old high school. There was a director there, Jeroen Kriek who worked at Growing Up In Public, also working with young people once a year. When I was 14, he did a Hamlet adaptation once and that performance has always stayed with me. That's more or less my primal Hamlet.

Wijbrand Schaap

Why did that one stick with you?

Paul Knieriem

For me, Hamlet is about the moment you learn about society. Every person hopefully grows up in a nice, safe environment. You accept your environment for what it is and then, at some point, the scales fall from your eyes and you realise that the world around you may not be as nice and fun and sweet and kind as you had always thought. In Hamlet, this is very concrete. That as a child you are torpedoed from adolescence into that adult world and suddenly think wait a minute: There's something rotten in the state of Denmark!

Hamlet was important to me, it even came up in one of the first conversations when I was still with the Toneelmakerij as a freelancer doing a production. It was even one of the first things I said to Liesbeth Coltof back then: 'I would like to do a Hamlet for young people one day'. But that I didn't really know: how and what and why. But when Abdelkader said that, I already thought: that could be an interesting starting point.

So it really did start with a fascination with that work, including Shakespeare. Then you start reading that and then you come to the question, "How then?" and, "How free should that adaptation be? Then you also delve into what the impact of that play was at the time. Or: where then is the appeal of that piece? Where is the topicality value? For Abdelkader, it was clear from the start that he very much wanted to write a Moroccan or an Arabic Hamlet, partly autobiographical, or at least adapt it to an Arabic context. But what is an Arabic context. What makes a Hamlet Arabic? What is Arab identity at all? At one point, I even had the idea that we should put it in some kind of mocromafia-like circuit.

But then I thought: if we now choose such a context is the mafia a good choice? No. Then again, I had problems with that. So at some point we thought: what if this Arab family is just a wealthy family? But where did they make their money? Then you come to real estate. What does that mean in a city like Amsterdam? That's how you move from association to association and gradually it turns out that such a performance is also very much about gentrification in Amsterdam New West.

And your question is: shouldn't you then just write a whole new piece about the Amsterdam real estate market? And then why do you need it at all? I get that, but you shouldn't be mistaken: First and foremost, we want to make this play for a young audience, for 12, 13, 14 plus. We would like schools to come to it. That school market, especially in Amsterdam is quite a fighting market. Those schools are offered an awful lot, so they can be extremely critical. And they prefer to book 1.5 years in advance.

Wijbrand Schaap

Worse than the theatres so to speak.

Paul Knieriem

On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, once you have them, you also know they will come. So the moment you start, you also have a part of your audience already guaranteed. The moment we do a project like this, you have to think very carefully: what are the brackets on the basis of which schools sign up, a year and a half in advance? Meanwhile, you still have to develop it. Do you know what it will end up being? So you need something based on which those schools can think: oh, but wait a minute, at least they are going to do this. So a known piece is also a bit of an opportunistic choice.

But there is something else at play, which is that I myself come from an environment where there was wealth, but no knowledge of art and literature. That was a world very distant from me. I was in awe of that for a very long time and felt that literature, art and theatre were something for other people. That's something of people in the periphery. I myself come from province.

Wijbrand Schaap

Which province? I also live in the province of Utrecht. It's very Amsterdamish to talk about 'the province'.

Paul Knieriem

I end up in Bennekom. That's a village between Ede and Wageningen.

Wijbrand Schaap

The Biblebelt, shall we say.

Paul Knieriem

Yes, the edge of the biblebelt.

Wijbrand Schaap

Yes, it skims past.

Paul Knieriem

Ede is biblebelt. Wageningen, on the other hand, is a very progressive university town. Anyway, so that always plays a role in my thinking about what kind of performances I want to make with De Toneelmakerij. I also want to show those kids: this might be a play you've heard of and you think it might not be for you. But certainly a play like Hamlet does have leads for a young audience. That's almost the bildungsgedachte, which of course is much more accepted in Germany.

Wijbrand Schaap

People lifting?

Paul Knieriem

Yes, but that somehow you also make this kind of repertoire accessible and introduce people to it and that perhaps this staging will make them think: maybe I should go to the theatre sometime, or maybe I should read a play like this. So there is a naive notion that through youth theatre you can make the cultural canon accessible to a young and wide audience. That is why I find this cultural appropriation amusing. It was very important for Abdelkader to put an Arab Hamlet on stage. That is also something we really got back. That such an icon of white male history - to put it mildly - is suddenly played by a boy from Amsterdam-West. With a Moroccan background. In a Moroccan Amsterdam accent. That does something to that young audience.

So those are pretty much the thoughts from which we arrived at this edit. Then, of course, the question is how far we got into it. That's then also a bit of the game for me. How are we going to tackle this scene? For instance that 'play within the play': should we have a bunch of stage actors come up? Oh no, wait a minute, we can also do something with The Lion King. That's the fun of it.

Wijbrand Schaap

That definitely came across. But I've seen about seven or eight Hamlets, so I'm slightly geeky in that area, and not at all measuring up to the audience, but so I kept getting hung up on all these practical questions: how are they going to resolve the actor scene? How are they going to solve Ophelia? And then you can call those funny solutions for the insiders, but what's in it for the outsiders? Shouldn't you have had a lot more guts, also towards the schools, towards the audience to just do that appropriation altogether and make it even more Moroccan?

The problem with the English-speaking people is that they only have one Shakespeare. We have a new one every five years. We don't know that monument as that text you never change. We can have a new one every year. So for us, doing a new Hamlet is not: I'm going to stage the masterpiece one time and how is this aria performed today? It's not an opera.

Do you actually have preliminary interviews?

Paul Knieriem

Not so much pre-interviews. They are sometimes prepared a bit. But of that, it's just always a question of what ultimately, in the whole logistics of our education department up to and including the moment they enter the room, sticks in the system. This is often quite disappointing. We make all kinds of newsletters and lesson plans and podcasts, but that still very often stays in a box in the corridor, so to speak. So you have to more or less assume that a school like that enters the room pretty much blank. We do have follow-up interviews from time to time, but in the end, for me the most important yardstick is sitting in such a room among the audience, on those wooden benches. I have built up a kind of sensor to feel whether they stay with it. And staying with it doesn't mean that they absorb the performance silently and breathlessly for an hour and three quarters of an hour, but you do get a feeling of whether the audience sympathises with the performance. That is why those try-outs in youth theatre are so important, because only then do you really see through the eyes of your audience.

It does happen that sometimes you completely rearrange things: scenes out, scenes in. I also always tell the actors that the performance remains mine until the premiere. Try-outs are just public rehearsals. We are still in the rehearsal process, so things will be able to be changed. In this case, I think it's quite an achievement that they stay on those wooden benches for at least an hour and three-quarters.

That's also what I really like about working in youth theatre: that you play performances for an audience that didn't initially choose it themselves. So there is no politeness. You have much more of that when you play your show on an adult circuit. Then people can also doze off quietly after five minutes. When it's over, they spring up and say they had a wonderful evening after all. Well, that won't happen to you with a youth performance like this, because if they don't like it, they will let you know.

Wijbrand Schaap

I was there when there was an art profile school. Those kids were all extremely interested. What is it like when you move more towards vmbo, what happens then?

Paul Knieriem

We play this show from vmbo to categorical grammar schools. I once sat in the auditorium with one with a grammar school from Hilversum, but they were really watching the thunder like chickens. This was a world they did not know. Gentrification, they had never thought about that. The moment you play it for an Amsterdam school, it doesn't really matter whether it's an art school or a VMBO. A lot of those schools they are super diverse. Then you do feel what representation and recognition does to a room.

Wijbrand Schaap

So that there is a guy on stage with an with an Amsterdam Moroccan accent?

Paul Knieriem

That does an awful lot to a room. And that Arabic is spoken. It does an awful lot to a hall that a man comes up and prays on a rug. It's somehow about their world, even if it's Shakespeare. Take our interpretation of Ophelia.

Wijbrand Schaap

Greta Thunberg in Amsterdam.

Paul Knieriem

She is best dismissed as perhaps a little potty-mouthed or over the top, but the moment we steal that for schools, she gets applause from the audience even with her first monologue.

Wijbrand Schaap

Right?

Paul Knieriem

That of is indeed considered very relevant by that young audience. Much more than I had thought of beforehand.

Wijbrand Schaap

I think that's a thing too. Because Ophelia is the madwoman of the show and then also happens to be from Extinction Rebellion? I wondered for a moment what the ideological background was for that. Doesn't that stigmatise her too much?

Paul Knieriem

What I get back from that young audience is they have a lot of feeling for that madness of Ophelia. That they do understand very well why she is rambling on. Because she is preaching a message that in no way resonates with the rest.

Wijbrand Schaap

In real estate.

Paul Knieriem

And yes, honestly that there are a lot of young people who also experience it that way. More than we might think.

Wijbrand Schaap

What do you mean?

Paul Knieriem

The world is going to hell and no one really gives a fuck.

Wijbrand Schaap

One has a point there.

Paul Knieriem

I do think that is a view that is much more common sense among 14- 15- and 16-year-olds than we can imagine. There is no room for cynicism there either. That is a truism.

Wijbrand Schaap

You yourself described, at the beginning of this conversation, how your first performance was a Hamlet,and that that may have contributed to your ambition to become a maker yourself. How many little Paul Knieriems have you experienced in the theatre now?

Paul Knieriem

I don't know. You can only say that in 10 or 15 years, right?

Wijbrand Schaap

That would be nice if one in a hundred got a spark, wouldn't it?

Paul Knieriem

Yes, I would hope so. Anyway, frankly, I'm not even concerned that they all want to be actors or directors. It's much more important that we start talking about equity of opportunity and about visual education where there are huge differences. Cultural capital is incredibly important for your self-esteem and the feeling that you can or may participate in this society. In that sense, you can really give something to people with youth theatre. For many people, this cultural education does not come naturally at all. I think we have a responsibility as a society in this respect.

Wijbrand Schaap

What is your next big classic you will do at De Toneelmakerij?

Paul Knieriem

This is a big family show in co-production with Sadettin K. We are going to do a very free adaptation of the 1001 night stories, for the big hall. It will be a family performance with Sadettin as a father with a daughter who is in a coma in a hospital. He tries to keep her with the living by telling stories.

Wijbrand Schaap

A reversal of it from the original story ?

Paul Knieriem

There is a conceptual inversion in it and, at the same time, it is indeed inspired by the stories, but in a current or contemporary context.

Wijbrand Schaap

Long live freedom.

Paul Knieriem

We are also working on four one-acts around Keti Koti. We will soon premiere Rabbit Hole. That's about someone who ends up in a rabbit hole. In that alternation of new stories and old stories, or adapted stories, is where the fun is for us.