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Indien je een mens bent, laat dit veld leeg:.

shakespeare

Theatre on demand offers British quality

by Wijbrand Schaap
21 August 201230 March 2022
2 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

Lots of bobbing on boards. That's what drama on television is mostly. And actors with weird reverberations in intimate scenes. That too. It is easy to shoot at attempts to bring successful performances to the TV or cinema screen. They almost always make viewers feel that their medium is shooting back 80 years in development. This is also why every attempt by the Dutch Public Broadcasting Service to make our fairly highly regarded stage art attractive to a wider audience via TV fails....

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Welcome to the Culture Press archive! As a member, you have access to all, over 4,000 posts we have made since our inception in 2009!

(Recent posts (under three months old) are available for all to read, thanks to our members!)

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Extremely imaginative Master and Margarita gets cheering reception on #HF12

by Wijbrand Schaap
22 June 20128 July 2016
4 min read
Holland Festival, SPECIALS

Shakespeare had it, Oscar savage had it, Monty Python had it and Simon McBurney has trucks full of it. So it is British and it is called humour, or rather the ability to show the absurdity of life as simultaneously hilarious and deeply tragic. And let that also apply to Russian Mikhail Bulgakov. So his unfinished novel The Master and Margarita has now had to wait almost 75 years for a director like Simon McBurney to turn it into theatre.

Read More "Extremely imaginative Master and Margarita gets cheering reception on #HF12

'I have all of Shakespeare's records in my cupboard'

by one of our members
11 June 201230 March 2022
3 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

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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Blood-soaked Macbeth fits festival theme perfectly but fails to touch #HF12

by Wijbrand Schaap
10 June 201213 February 2019
4 min read
Holland Festival, SPECIALS

Imagine Arjan Robben. The much-troubled frontman of the Dutch national team has just seen a brilliant move rewarded with a penalty and he is ready to take it. Out comes a field hand with a new set of adhesive letters for his shirt because the numbers are no longer legible from the stands. Lots of lashing, shirt off, seconds glue. Circumstances, in short. After two minutes, the fielder is gone, the number readable and the referee's whistle sounds. Then try to hit the target.

Read More "Blood-soaked Macbeth fits festival theme perfectly but fails to touch #HF12

In the wonderfully subtle The Speaker's Progress, Shakespeare's farce suddenly becomes a revolutionary weapon #hf12

by Daniel Bertina
7 June 201213 February 2019
4 min read
Holland Festival, SPECIALS

Tight-lipped. Freshly cut. And with a beatific, apt voice, The Speaker - played by director Sulayman Al-Bassam - looks like a slick public relations man. Or better: a civilised Arab dictator with an Oxford degree. One of those who is supported by the West and deeply hated by his own people. He steps behind a lectern and narrates. Once upon a time,...

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Survive the carnage, smeared nudity and frenzied screams in Requiem 3, and note the moving lyrics #hf12

by Daniel Bertina
5 June 201213 February 2019
4 min read
Holland Festival, SPECIALS

Vincent Macaigne strikes me as a director you shouldn't fight with. Right from the first seconds of Requiem 3, he rams full steam ahead with the most hysterical opening scene I have seen in ages, and keeps on hacking relentlessly for 80 minutes. It takes a while to get through. But suddenly, in this tsunami of...

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Awards for Dutch Chewboy

by Leo Bankersen
18 February 201229 March 2022
3 min read
ACTUAL, For members only, FILM

Towards the end of this Berlinale, it could be heard in the corridors that the Danish costume piece A Royal Affair about a nipped-in-the-nippled revolution was surely going to win the Golden Bear. The jury did not care about that, however, and designated Caesar Must Die by the Taviani brothers as the best film. Caesar Must Die (photo:...

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Berlin 2012 - Shakespeare knew it all

by Leo Bankersen
16 February 201230 March 2022
3 min read
ACTUAL, For members only, FILM

Would today's revolution makers even study Shakespeare? In Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die), the competition entry by the Italian Taviani brothers, we witness the preparation and performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Anyone watching this with the world's noise in mind will often feel a shock of recognition. The tragedy about a coup in ancient Rome shows...

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5-hour marathon Roman Tragedies favourite with spectators Toneelgroep Amsterdam

by one of our members
14 February 201229 March 2022
3 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

Photo: jan Versweyveld We were somewhat mildly ironic about it, but hats off, meanwhile, to Toneelgroep Amsterdam's PR department and the audience, who responded remarkably well to the 'choose the reprise' campaign the company launched a few weeks back. We have the hard numbers we feared we would never see. And they are credible. We quote the press release:....

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Ebook sales give publishers knowledge they would rather not have

by one of our members
7 February 201229 March 2022
2 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

We already noticed it in the daily twitter stream: when it comes to book reviews on twitter, the 'low' genres (at least according to connoisseurs) dominate the charts: fantasy, diaries of disease sufferers, 'regional work', howto's and erotica. No news, you might say, but there is more to it. Thanks to the advent of the e-reader, publishers (at least in America) are gaining insight into what people actually read. And that picture does not exactly please the advocates of cultural upliftment of the people ...

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Welcome to the Culture Press archive! As a member, you have access to all, over 4,000 posts we have made since our inception in 2009!

(Recent posts (under three months old) are available for all to read, thanks to our members!)

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Top or flop: audience picks repertoire first theatre company in the Netherlands

by one of our members
2 February 20128 July 2016
3 min read
ACTUAL

We got another press release, and wondered: top or flop? How does idiosyncratic artistry rhyme with audience-determined repertoire choice? Andne: do all those people who chose the winning piece also get a free-or at least discounted-ticket to the performance of their choice? Andne: who checks the results, as there is no notary. Enne:.

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#HF11: They're going to make another big cut to the Russians at Toneelgroep Amsterdam

by Wijbrand Schaap
17 June 201113 February 2019
3 min read
Holland Festival, SPECIALS

Cologne and Paris may not have been built in a day, but it took less than three days to fly to the moon. A warped comparison to say that a show that rattles three days before its premiere can turn out to be an unimaginable hit on the premiere itself. So something like that could happen with The Russians, the latest show

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Death Horse puts on bold shoes and waves goodbye to Shakespeare in 'Bye Bye'

by one of our members
21 March 201129 March 2022
4 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

Photo: Sanne Peper The Amsterdam company Dood Paard itself translated Shakespeare's 'Othello' and waves goodbye to the bard with 'Bye Bye'. The quirky collective brings a one-and-a-half-hour contemporary comedy of morals and soul mirror, in which pointing at 'The Other' is central. Shakespeare's plays are quite often performed quite reverently. . The adored 'bard' from Stratford-upon-Avon has the Angel... You can log in now...

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Superior played-in recordings are no guarantee of delivering a reference CD

by one of our members
24 February 201130 March 2022
5 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra currently has an unprecedented luxury: it is releasing CDs on two labels at the same time. How is that possible? The orchestra signed under its own name with BIS Records, the label with which the eccentric owner Von Bahr releases one extraordinary recording after another, while chief conductor Yannick Néze-Séguin is old-fashionedly under contract as maestro with EMI....

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NRC, Vandenende Foundation and Erasmus University show shocking lack of knowledge of art world

by one of our members
31 January 201130 March 2022
3 min read
ACTUAL, For members only

The website has since been updated, but since this post prompted that update, we are leaving it up.
Always good to support a new initiative. That's why we were also pleased with the constructive plan of Rotterdam's Erasmus University and former art newspaper NRC Handelsblad to organise a symposium on new art funding. After all, the government wants to get rid of art subsidies, and instead of opposing that, you can start thinking about alternative sol...

You can now log in to continue reading!

Welcome to the Culture Press archive! As a member, you have access to all, over 4,000 posts we have made since our inception in 2009!

(Recent posts (under three months old) are available for all to read, thanks to our members!)

Become a member, or log in below:

High praise for Curlew River; less for De Keersemaeker and Mendes #hf10

by one of our members
5 June 201030 March 2022
5 min read
For members only, Holland Festival, SPECIALS

Curlew River Photo: Bertrand Stofleth For every independent journalist in the Netherlands, there are about 15 information officers. It is therefore obvious that these spokespeople largely determine the image in the media. Could that be why in the newspapers and television programmes surrounding the Holland Festival, the announcements are far more numerous than the critical reviews? A look at the...

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Despite Dillane's splendid role, soporific Tempest shows failure of Sam Mendes' Bridge Project #hf10

by Wijbrand Schaap
5 June 201029 March 2022
3 min read
For members only, Holland Festival, SPECIALS

By Wijbrand Schaap (photo by Joan Marcus) You can have Bach's St Matthew Passion performed by 15 canaries, an electric guitar, a drum kit, a ukulele and a accordion, and it will still be beautiful, because it is Bach. Similarly, you can have Shakespeare's up-and-coming British plays performed by a group of Americans, and it will...

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We provide links at NRC culture blog #hf10

by one of our members
3 June 201030 March 2022
2 min read
Holland Festival, SPECIALS

Wilfred Takken muses today on the character Jacques in the Shakespeare comedy As You Like It. The actor Stephen Dillane turns it into a wonderful Bob Dylan in The Bridge Project, says NRC reviewer Takken: When Dylan was once asked if he considered himself the "voice of a generation", he replied, "I'm just a song and dance man. Everyone laughed, but...

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As You Like It despite brilliant jokes and fantastic Bob Dylan impersonation still a long sit #hf10

by Wijbrand Schaap
3 June 201030 March 2022
4 min read
For members only, Holland Festival, SPECIALS

By Wijbrand Schaap, Photo Joan Marcus So we don't have that. In the Netherlands. So many good actors of name and fame to fill an entire Shakespeare comedy with top actors, right down to the smallest edelfiguration. Ok, we come a long way with our Pierre Bokma's, our Gijs Scholten van Aschats, a Lineke Rijxman, Mariek Heebink and Ariane Schluter, and flat Elsie de...

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