oude meuk
Theaterfestival 2000
A saving grace, by Aurèle Parisien
Sigh. You know how it is. You go far away somewhere and are having a perfectly interesting time and then you run into some bore from the town next door back home. Having seen De Roovers' 'Maria Stuart' and Needcompany's 'King Lear', I feel as if I've been cornered by the characters of Beverly Hills 90210 and then tied to a chair and forced to watch reruns of the Jerry Springer Show. Fortunately, Discordia's 'Je me souviens' provided one of those sublime, unexpected vistas that makes a whole trip worthwhile.
This is not to say that there were not some interesting elements in both of the "official" productions. In 'Maria Stuart', for instance, the prison was cleverly created by pinning the queen's dress to the floor with concrete blocks and placing Elizabeth on top of stool in a dress that flowed to the floor conveyed a sense of both regal authority and teetering fragility. I suppose I could even have lived with the terrible male costumes (were these guys from the Klingon Empire or something?), the hoaky Marx brothers hat schtick [?], and the silly pastoral interludes - if it were not for the acting.
The male performers ranged from weak to adequate, but Sofie Sente was downright irritating in the title role. Her Mary Stuart was on the level of an impetuous babe in a badly-scripted American television show and the confrontation between Mary and Elizabeth was no better than a trite hissy fit. Sara de Bosschere had a bearing that was somewhat convincing as Elizabeth. In fact, one of my Czech colleagues insisted that she has the makings of a great actress and that her performance was the only real acting she had seen in Amsterdam. Well, no one else would venture that far.
I do not know whether De Roovers' production was simply incompetent or some cleverly ironic, post-modern undermining of Schiller - I simply couldn't care less. Oops, spoke too soon because this brings us to 'King Lear' à la Tommy James & the Shondells. There certainly was lots of hanky panky going on on stage in Jan Lauwers' production, and I hear he threw a pretty convincing hissy fit of his own afterwards.
He resolved the difficulty of combining his visual approach and a penchant for modern dance with the demands of King Lear in a way I would never have thought of: simply scroll the text on a screen above the stage and then do whatever you want underneath it. The fool is eliminated by combining him with Kent, Gloucester is immobilized in a chair throughout most of the performance, Edgar is turned into a squatter perched on top of a speaker at the edge of the stage, and Kent becomes Jerry Springer refereeing the climactic confrontations, taking his leave by shooting himself in the head. You could say that this treatment of the forces of good indicates that Lauwers has a deeply pessimistic and cynical view of the play. But there is so little cohesion, so little acting, and so much gratuitous dance and nudity in this show that the only thing I can safely conclude is that Lauwers has a deeply cynical view of theatre itself.
Having heard so much about Discordia since my arrival in Amsterdam, both due to the 't Barre Land and De Roovers productions and to the structural funding crisis, I jumped on the opportunity to see their performance of George Perec's 'Je me souviens'. Discordia combined it with an American text, thus sprinkling the Dutch with English references to sandwich spread, the titles of love songs, and even Canadian icon Joni Mitchell. The imagistic suggestiveness of the text, read randomly by two actors, was magnified by three black-clad actors who gradually moved a collection of objects from the back of the narrow stage to the front: a scythe, a box of rose petals, a fire extinguisher, a wheel of fortune. Certain things are bound to stand out in the current circumstances.
The intense stage presence of Matthias de Koning as a kind of timeless wandering Jew was overwhelming. Behind the interjections of De Koning's rambling stories and the spontaneous rememberings of the two younger actors loomed the silent presence of Jan Joris Lamers. As relief from a festival of plays packed with much sound and fury but utterly devoid of any human warmth or theatrical honesty, the Discordia performance was a saving grace. Thanks to its evocative simplicity and humanity, the concentrated discipline of the actors, and its pure theatricality, 'Je me souviens' is the only work I have seen that is satisfying. In the present context it is also brave and inspiring. Once back in Montreal I will be able to say "Ik kerinner mij Discordia." May others who come later be able to say as much.
Aurèle Parisien
Aurèle Parisien is a freelance theatre critic from Montreal whose Dutch has improved by leaps and bounds over the past week. He has opted for forming his opinion of the Dutch from the wonderful friends he has made at TM during the festival and is spending the next few days convelescing from the festival in the Rijksmuseum.