European Stages https://europeanstages.org Flemish Theatrical Exceptionalism Mostly Glimmers, Sometimes Wavers This past June, as the Flemish theatre season waned, I had a chance to see a few fascinating selections from this lively theatre community. In the wake of a momentous election which saw the rise of the Extreme Right, to the disturbing degree that Bart De Wever’s Flemish Nationalist party rose to first place, Flemish directors and companies continue to stand out in Europe for audacity, creativity, and direct connection with their audience. While viewing one of the four shows at the performing arts complex in Antwerp, De Singel, I ran into Gie Cassiers, director of yet another show I had seen (Hamlet Against Hamlet) and Artistic Director of Antwerp’s principal municipal theatre, Het Toneelhuis. He reports that the Extreme Right’s assumption of power had not yet produced any form of outright censorship or pressure to change the form or content of the work produced, but intimated that their advent had already led to cuts for the performing arts. This is a logical development from one point of view, as eliminating the generous safety net and strong governmental support for culture that Belgium has long enjoyed is one key tenet of the Extreme Right. Still, it must be asserted from the outset of this article how foolish and contradictory it would be for a political party that claims ascendancy and—if it is not abusive to apply the word here—exceptionalism for Flanders within the overall Belgian landscape, to contemplate cutting the legs out from one of the language community’s most successful features. For Flemish theatre currently is by most measures more remarkable than the French-language theatre of Belgium, which is generally in a condition of stasis, while the Flemish scene continues its long run of innovation and excellence year after year. Its theatre scene, furthermore, is recognized as one of the foremost in all of Europe. Flanders’ directors are sought after in Germany, Spain, England, and America. Gie Cassiers, Ivo van Hove, and Needcompany are just a few of the directors and companies that are regularly invited to appear at BAM in Brooklyn, at the New York Theatre Workshop and Lincoln Center, all in the American theatre capital. Jan Fabre regularly shows all over Europe in lavish productions and installations (and regularly, closer to home, at Montclair, New Jersey). And it is a matter of great irony and pride that Flemish Belgian—not Belgian French-language—productions have been specially featured for many successive years, generally being awarded prime venues such as the Palais des Papes, at the most solicited French-language showcase of all—the annual Festival at Avignon. 1 / 14 European Stages https://europeanstages.org Gie Cassiers's Hamlet against Hamlet, by Tom Lanoye, with ensembles from Toneelhuis and Toneelgroep Amsterdam. Photo: Jan Versweyveld Theatre is one of the most visible and rewarding ways for any national community to gain recognition internationally. It is therefore a measure of the incomprehension and obliviousness to this precise point that would cause De Wever and his party to fail to see its value. Reducing the lush production values of Flanders’ theatres through budget cuts will only serve to lower Flanders in the eyes of the world and rob her of one of her most obvious ambassadorial media. I already see evidence of diminishment in Gie Cassiers’s latest production, Hamlet Tegen Hamlet (Hamlet Against Hamlet) by Tom Lanoye, which I caught in its final performance on tour at Brussels’ Kaaitheater, a troubling development for a director who has made his mark in New York and from whom we continue to expect so much. Tom Lanoye’s reimagining of Hamlet has Claudius killing Hamlet’s father for political and idealistic reasons, not principally out of simple ambition or sexual jealousy, as an outside force threatens the Danish kingdom, requiring a strong response of which Hamlet’s father is supposedly incapable. The play is resolved by the return to the court of an impetuous Laertes who, in succession does away with Gertrude, Ophelia, and Claudius, since he finds that Hamlet has been too slow in resolving to carry out his revenge. Also, Lanoye mines the play for possible incestuous relations between Polonius and Ophelia. Further, whole characters such as Horatio and Fortinbras have been dispensed with. Lanoye employs Shakespeare’s text where it pleases him, cuts sections that vex him, and has written goodly amounts of original text to fill in as well, notably during a lengthy debate between Hamlet and Laertes toward the 2 / 14 European Stages https://europeanstages.org end. There is not necessarily a huge disparity between his language and Shakespeare’s when it is translated and typically streamlined into Dutch. The production has a female Hamlet, here played by Abke Haring. This innovation will not strike an American audience as earth-shattering, considering that we had Diane Venora playing the role in Joe Papp’s production at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1982, that everyone took in easy stride (and hadn’t Sarah Bernhardt done the same many decades earlier?). Nor will the textual changes be so very disturbing, considering the plethora of liberties now being taken with Shakespeare everywhere. And mixing of Shakespeare’s texts with others’—notably by Lanoye himself in his 1997 ground-breaking Ten Oorlog (To War)—has also been done. When Shakespeare is performed in a different language than the original English, the blasphemy of combining his sacrosanct words with other people’s is greatly diluted. In general, Dutch-language translations of Shakespeare tend to strip it of baroque trappings and make it much more hard-edged and direct in any case. We have come to look to Gie Cassiers for technical invention. He is a wizard with combining live-feed and recorded video imagery with live stage action. He uses video in ways that enliven the drama and make us forget the spoken text, so mind-boggling is the ingenuity of the visual dimension of many of his productions. Here, there is a metal armature down-center, like a sort of angular mechanized tree, with odd- shaped screens plastered all over it. On these screens, throughout the production, appear morphing colors, transforming images of the actors’ faces, etc. The rest of the stage is essentially naked, and the scenery and video dimension of the show are far less commanding and compelling than in his other shows; this relegates them to mere background for the action, and the remaining action is essentially verbal. If the result then appears fairly conventional, we consequently look to the actors for resplendent acting and the author for brilliant revisioning of Shakespeare. Neither really occurs. All we have are stolidly competent actors and a version of Hamlet that is mildly interesting without the bells and whistles we expect from Cassiers’ fertile mind. We are absolutely willing to cut both Lanoye and Cassiers some slack. They are world leaders in theatre production, and here they seem to be treading water. One does have to wonder if the slender pickings on the level of theatrical spectacle are the result of a diminished budget (see above), or a weariness of the imagination. Time will tell. 3 / 14 European Stages https://europeanstages.org Luk Perceval's Platanov by Anton Chekov. Photo: courtesy of author Luk Perceval is back in Flanders! He, arguably the best director of a generation of brilliant talents who had been one of the co-directors of Blauwe Mandaag Compagnie and founder of Het Toneelhuis, site of the transformation of Antwerp’s municipal theatre that had set off the chain reaction which overturned the entire calcified Flemish repertory system, had then been lured away to Germany. The higher salaries and handsomer production budgets there prompted his departure some years back, but he now returns annually to do one or more shows with NTG, the large municipal theatre of Ghent. This year’s tour is actually a revival of last year’s feature, Chekhov’s Platonov. Chekhov is one of Perceval’s strong suits, and over the years he has staged most of the major plays. One of his earliest productions, through which he first made a name for himself, was The Seagull. For those who saw Perceval’s Seagull, the aesthetic approach to Platonov will seem quite familiar, but this venture into self-imitation proves equally rewarding to the earlier work. Perceval’s treatment of Chekhov texts at once taps into the essential kernel of the human drama in all its humor and pathos, and is blasphemous toward the traditional costume drama approach to mounting it. The first slap in the face of tradition is textual. Perceval has eliminated half the characters and many sub- plots and plot twists, in a sense making the whole action retrospective. The second affront is scenic. 4 / 14 European Stages https://europeanstages.org Swept away are the late Victorian interiors, replete with knickknacks and samovars, to be replaced with a simple line of chairs parallel to the footlights in the richly encrusted Victorian seating section of the Bourla Theatre. In this case, there is also a grand piano placed prominently downstage at the near end of a track—like a railroad track running diagonally from downstage to upstage. And that’s all the scenery there is. While on a few occasions the actors walk along the raised tracks in pursuit of each other, the height of the tracks obliging them to lift their legs ‘way up over them only afterwards to sink down into the interstitial spaces and, in effect, to sprint in slow motion, the principal purpose of the tracks is for the piano, which at some point in the show, moved imperceptibly all the way from downstage right to upstage left.