oude meuk

Theaterfestival 2000

No better than a foreign footballer, by Aurèle Parisien

Three days, three plays. 'De Cid', 'Platonov', 'India Song'. 't Barre Land's and Het Zuidelijk Toneel's productions, in particular, are such polar opposites in formal terms. The former's 'Platonov' has been the most difficult production so far for "The Foreign Critics", as we are fondly being called - do we stick out in the theatre the way the Irish football fans do in the Leidseplein I wonder? Since the subtleties of what is said and how is the essence of Chekov, we could not appreciate much more than the energy between the actors during the four-hour performance on the almost bare set.

Under such conditions the critic becomes an anthropologist trying to puzzle out a newly discovered tribe and who, more likely than not, confuses background and foreground, essential truth and trivial detail. The audience becomes just as significant as the actors. It is a completely different kind of problem than the usual ones facing the critic and I find it refreshing. It activates other senses and other kinds of attention, in the way the blind man's hearing becomes more acute.

After the formality of 'De Cid', I enjoyed the casualness of the actors and of the mise-en-scene of 'Platonov'. The acting, or almost the anti-acting, communicated their intimacy with each other and with their audience - all were thoroughly enjoying themselves and each other and this is contagious. I also enjoyed the rawness of the factory surroundings, how the hanging copper panels of the backdrop fit in with this setting, the view of the landscape outside with its passing trains, the rain pounding on the roof and dripping to the floor. These elements together with the direct address to the audience create a formal realism that takes the place of the artificial Chekovian realism that 't Barre Land so avoids and I cannot help wondering whether this is but the substitution of one stylistic tyranny for another.

'India Song', in sharp contrast to the connected open-endedness of 'Platonov', was completely closed-in upon itself, a dreamworld in which the actors seemed so many puppets under the control of director Ivo van Hove's and designer Jan Versweyveld's revolving ventilator. It was sumptuously visual, with the relentless voicetrack becoming just another langorous elements in the Harry de Wit score that so seamlessly wedded West to East. The speaking, shining, inexorable, and all encompassing, ventilator is a brilliant symbol for the obsessive circling around Anne-Marie.

The mechanical clockwork of the production perfectly melds form and content to the degree that when the French consul screams out in the otherwise speechless performance, we cannot know whether it is an expression of the character's entrapment by Anne-Marie or the actor's entrapment by Van Hove. Did the director intend to build-in a condemnation of his own approach? In the end I had no empathy for the people in this ice-cold drama but much with the actors.

Perhaps I am no better than a foreign footballer after all. Three days, three plays. And my impression is not ultimately of contrast and difference but rather of one dominant theme: overwhelming social constriction. Instead of a Romantic hero, Rijnders makes Rodrigo a moral weakling unable to rise above social expectation. In dissolving into its physical surroundings and colloquial address, 't Barre Land makes the Dutch into self-indulgent Chekovian characters unable to escape the past or to act. And Van Hove is the bleakest of all: this society is so much like the formalised, disconnected, and inward-looking diplomatic corps isolated in a foreign place that even the artistic statement of this fact will oppress the actors into silence, make them play to a metronome, and end in a crucifixion.

If nothing else, these productions make me look at the wild abandonment and libertarianism that is the surface of Amsterdam with a quizical scepticism. After all, I could not help thinking how much that ventilator looked like a windmill.

Aurèle Parisien
Aurèle Parisien, a critic from Montreal, is now over his jetlag. He neither plays nor watches what he calls 'soccer' but he is enjoying riding a bicyle on the 'straat's and over the 'gracht's.