The most violent of passions feel tender in Holland, writes Nehad Selaiha Click to view caption The most endearing thing about the Dutch, apart from their courtesy and gentleness, is their relaxed attitude towards their language and cultural identity -- that awful bogey that currently seems to haunt our thinking in the Arab world and, doubtless, in many other Third World countries. In Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Zwolle, and even that charming rural island up North called Terschelling, everybody seemed to speak English; no danger there of someone looking at you askance and making you feel a veritable savage because you do not speak their national language -- as would normally happen in France, Italy or England. A friendly smile is what you get as soon as you approach someone and whatever your colour or language, they would bring out whatever store of foreign languages they possess, however faulty or meagre, and lay it right in front of you to choose from, making you feel all the time that you are a fellow human being struggling with them to effect that most glibly talked about and yet most difficult to achieve thing called communication. On a Sunday morning in Amsterdam, when that little, charming city with its many bridges, canals and generous trees was still sleeping off the merry carousals of the night before, I wandered out early, looking for the Rembrandt House. There was not a soul in sight, then a young woman on a bicycle appeared in the distance. I waved to her not expecting her to stop; but she did, got off her bicycle and walked by me until the door of the museum chatting and left me with a big smile saying it would not be open for another hour. One wonders what makes the people of this land less uptight and more friendly than others -- something to do with the rolling landscape perhaps? Or the fact that there seems to be a preponderance of young people? I was struck by an overwhelming impression of youth; even the middle- aged look young. Is it all that cycling they do which gives them this fresh aspect and outlook? Whatever the reason, in all the plays that I saw over the 12 days I spent there, that impression of youth stayed with me. It was particularly strong in Pierre Audi's Carmen (Peter Brook's condensed version of Bizet's Carmen), acted by a group of young singers, students of the Opera Academy. It was the most convincing Carmen I have seen; the turbulent passions which had always struck me as a bit silly and overdone when played by middle-aged people, of whom you can never believe all these romantic upheavals, seemed more natural when performed by adolescents, unlike other Carmens I have seen. It combined a kind of eroticism with a large degree of pathos; the extreme youth of the performers allowed Audi to carry out his stunning and original scenography which involved climbing up and down a huge staircase and leaping up to a small stage hitched up right in the middle of the auditorium, with the audience sitting on two sides of it, with the orchestra on the third. All this strenuous effort was performed by the singers without spoiling any of their notes, which would be impossible with older performers. Think of how liberating this Carmen would be to our singers should it come to Cairo. Silly as it seems to say this, the show's impact was not only musical; it had a real theatrical impact, a lot of which was due to the electric acting and not just to the competence of the singing, which is unfortunately the case in most operas I have seen. Equally impressive was Dirk Tanghe's production of Peter Shaffer's Equus -- the cruel story of adolescent Alan Strang who blinds six horses that witnessed his first sexual experience because of his religious obsessions, and his subsequent treatment by the psychiatrist Dysart -- at the Paardenkathedraal Theatre in Utrecht. Against a huge screen magnified video images flowed in a nightmarish, surrealistic sequence, fading into each other and merging images of horses, naked arms reaching out, the bodies of the young lovers in their first sexual encounter, blood splashing, an orange light which spreads and spreads until it covers the whole screen. In contrast, in front of this screen, the only set consisted of a desk with a computer and two metal chairs, expressing the cold world of the analyst Dysart, who treats the boy. Among its unforgettable scenes was the encounter of the psychiatrist with the boy's parents, played by Mirjam Hegger and Bas Keijzer, with great economy of expression and the subtlest nuances of the passions underneath. With the way they sat, the way the mother held her feet under the chair, the posture of the father, they expressed their complex relationship, their sense of guilt, their unwillingness to face up to the problems in their marriage, their frustrations, the problems in their relationship with their son. Without understanding a single word, you could read, simply from their body language as they sat next to each other, the type of relationship that binds them together. In the foyer after the show, I was stunned to discover that both were quite young; Keijzer had graduated only three years ago. Jeroen van Venrooij and Louis van Beek, as the boy and the psychiatrist, were also young, and quite mesmeric. Euripides' Bacchanten (The Bacchae) directed by Johan Simons and Paul Koek, with Nouri Iskandar's Syrian Orthodox music group from Aleppo, for the Hollandia Theatre group, was an ambitious attempt at bringing together Dutch acting and Oriental singing. Each of these was fine alone; but one felt all the time as if the show was split down the middle, and it never managed to coalesce. My guess is that, given more time, such experiments could conceivably create a genuine meeting point for both cultures. Another challenging experiment was Steve Reich's and Beryl Corot's multimedia music theatre piece called Three Tales. It was a combination of documentary and live concert, complete with an orchestra and singers on-stage, without being exactly either; it seems to be a new form, billed by its makers as a "digital, documentary video-opera". A theatre of ideas questioning humanity's future, it was divided into "Bikini", about nuclear bombs, "Dolly" about cloning (Dolly is the first cloned creature, a sheep), and "Robots-Cyborgs- Immortality". The libretto juxtaposed ironic comments on humanity's supposedly newfound omnipotence with passages from the Book of Genesis, the implication being that humankind's setting itself up as God's equal is fraught with innate danger. At times I felt a kind of hidden image: though it was very interesting and absorbing to watch, I felt that the world as far as this show is concerned consisted simply of the West. Apart from a couple of shots in the Bikini tale, the rest of the world was disturbingly missing from this supposedly universal world-view, even though it reminded me of an unpleasant trend here in the Middle East. Three Tales' insistence on tracing everything back to the Bible had a disturbing fundamentalist tendency reminiscent of the slogan "Islam is the Solution" and the attendant concept that everything would be all right if we just went back to the teachings of the ancient books and that anything technological or new is automatically suspect. Also provocative was Con Amore at the Amsterdam Municipal Theatre Group, which used the lyrics of Monteverdi's opera L'Incoronazione di Poppea, set in a kitchen, right in the middle of the auditorium, flanked on both sides by sleeping areas for the actors. Without knowing the opera, which would perhaps create an intriguing contrast between the modern set and the old story, it could come across as a highly naturalistic kitchen-sink drama à la Wesker, plus a lyrical element as the actors frequently burst into song, in addition to a lot of nudity, love-making, egg-breaking and salad-making on stage. In fact, in one scene, in which comedy was laced with a sense of threat and pent-up violence, we find two nude males, one of whom lays the other down on a table, coats him with flour and proceeds to make him into an omelette, after which they rise and take a shower, thoughtfully provided right on-stage. Again, part of the vitality of the show stemmed from the extreme youth of the actors and their blithe audacity. But for sheer youth, nobody could beat the International Theatre School Festival, in which the teenage Abke Haring wrote and acted a one-woman show, Genocide. Despite her young age, she possesses the potential of a great actress: one of its hallmarks is the ability to command a large audience despite the language barrier. Naked, on a completely bare stage, she managed to body forth the complex love-hate relationship between a young woman and her mother, slipping in and out of different characters smoothly. When she finally, at the play's end, puts on a plain, dark dress, a sign of her mother's death, it was a powerful and moving dramatic moment: paradoxically, she seemed even less protected and more alone than she had been nude. She looked so young and so helpless in the dress that you just wanted to envelop her in a big comforting hug. By contrast, choreographer Meg Stewart's professional Alibi, from Germany, was the most disappointing, rambling, three-hour chaotic mix of acrobatics I have seen for quite a while. Pretentiously masquerading as an agonised existential comment on modern life, lack of communication and similar claptrap, it was par excellence the most affected and self- indulgent show in the Holland Festival. It seemed that the choreographer was intent on beating every ounce of life out of her poor young cast, throwing them around on the floor and otherwise tormenting them for close on three hours, which seemed like five. One simply couldn't wait for it to end. Not only dull and boring, but masquerading as something profound as well, it had no alibi. At one point, apparently to bribe the audience into staying, the lead actress distributed one-dollar bills to the audience members in the first row, which did not prevent some of them from noisily leaving the hall. Feeling increasingly victimised, I envied them their courage, and never before hated quite so much my cowardice, the so-called professional integrity of the critic which impelled me to suffer till the end. Equally puerile and ridiculously hyped was The Lunatics' open-air performance Mare Tranquillitatis, which I saw at the City as Theatre Festival in Swolle. Using massive quantities of water, which I couldn't help feeling was a terrible waste, gratuitous light- and sound-effects, an enormous slide, dangling hammocks, and a huge crane, they purported to reenact an old legend about an eighth sea, searched for by modern Vikings. The overall impression, though, was very silly; decked out like cave-men, the actors indulged in vapid antics and spoke pseudo-primitive gibberish; the highlight of the show was an actor relieving himself and producing a veritable fountain of water, which reached high into the sky. Stravinsky's Mavra, by Opera Spanga, in the open air, was more than adequate compensation for The Lunatics. The opera was acted in the front rooms and the street in front of two enchanting adjoining townhouses. You could see the people through the front windows, on all three floors, as well as arriving by bicycle and going into the houses. The orchestra was placed in a tent next to the building, and a raked seating area was set up in the square. It was really quite charming, not only because of the exquisite singing and the comic flair, but partly because of the feeling that we were peeping into the windows of someone's home. The trip to the Oerol Festival on the island of Terschellig was quite theatrically rewarding despite the torrential rain. Blok & Steel with Alexander Balanescu's Looking Up at Down, with three musicians and four dancers, was physically vibrant, with modern dance and acrobatics, and with some profound moments. Also wonderful was the last part of the Orkater Company's three related shows, False Waltz, The Couch and Sigh, portraying the life of a couple (Ria Marks and Titus Tiel Groenstege) in youth, middle age, and old age. I caught Sigh, the old-age performance. Made up only of music and movement, it was beautiful -- a mixture of gentle humor with real profundity. The old couple -- quite young in real life -- staggered about, propping each other up, very funny, and very touching. The show combined the delight of silent cinema with the glory of the art of mime. But the real Kris Nikolson's performance, The Netherlands (a play on the nether regions of despair which one has to transcend) which combined circus, dance, video projections and live music was performed in a stable, and the delicious smell of horses, who were kicked out temporarily and stood forlornly in a field outside, was an added bonus. The circus acts were used metaphorically to express what is really inexpressible: breaking bounds, transcending human misery with its many aspects, reaching for joy. The trapeze- and rope-acts, for once, were not merely acrobatics: they seemed ingeniously choreographed air-dances. I was thrilled to learn it would be coming to this year's CIFET, and feel sure it will prove as popular as Nikolson's former one-woman show which won her the Best Actress Award at CIFET a few years ago. Apart from the shows, equally fruitful and enjoyable were the long and interesting discussions about theatre with some of the most sensitive and experienced people in the field. The warmth of these encounters will always remain in my memory, especially about building cultural bridges between Holland and Egypt, which hopefully will bear fruit in the near future.
