Wow! I wish I had seen the first of their shows so that I could recommend every single person I know go and see this performance. This was amazing theatre. Bear with me, because I was sceptical when I heard the premise.
Six hours of Shakespeare plays back to back to back without intermission. In order of performance they played: Coriolanus, Julius Caeser and Antony and Cleopatra. Only short breaks for set changes. All in Dutch with surtitles.
There were interesting ideas that I was aware of with this performance. During the show, the audience would be encouraged to go on stage and sit on parts of the set to view. Food and drinks were served on stage. The show was broadcast live throughout the Festival Theatre so if drinks were being purchased, the audience would not miss out on anything. The crowd was encouraged to take photos and tweet during the performance and they showed some of the tweets during set change.
During a harrowing moment for Cleopatra she approached and hugged an audience member on the stage, stood back and pleaded with her in Dutch while the person sitting next to the nodding recipient of this plea took a photo with a smart phone. I cannot remember Cleopatra's line because it was a moment that transcended the need for understanding. What was more important was the interaction and the reactions.
14 actors played the parts of the 36 characters used in the three obviously truncated plays. The costumes were modernised and video and 'news' broadcasts were part of it all. Televisions on set played continuous news footage or Winter Olympics highlights if they werent simulcasting the play. The entire auditorium was utilised. In one particularly spectacular death, the death of Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, the scene even spilled out further as he ran out of the theatre and the building with cameraman in toe, onto King William Road. Here was a man in his death throes, shirt open and partly off soliloquising in Dutch and being filmed throwing himself on the footpath and making as if to cross the road into traffic while pedestrians walked on and cyclists rode by. (It brought to mind Grant Hackett's and Ian Thorpe's difficulties that had happened so recently.)
The actors not involved in the scenes were eating and drinking on the stage with the audience. And what made the show so engaging, I think, was that it highlighted the beauty of Shakespere's poetry without the ancient language that makes it so difficult to wade through his work in the current age. By translating the text into Dutch and back into modern English the plays were stripped of their effort to comprehend the words and language and I could simply enjoy the meaning and the stories and the performances.
My highlights were the performance, and beard, of Roeland Fernhout as Brutus, the speech of Mark Antony by Hans Kesting during Julius Caesar (But Brutus says he was ambitious and Brutus in an honourable man...), and everyone's intensity in the closing moments of Antony and Cleopatra but particluarly that of Chris Nietvelt as Cleopatra. I had never envisaged the licentious and even homoerotically-charged possibilities of Antony and Cleopatra but the cast did turn on a magificently hedonistic performance.
And a huge shout out to the staff who provided drinks and food on set to whispering patrons who were concentrating on reading subtitles instead of handing over the correct denominations with which to pay for their order.
I have attached a link to the company's website and I will be checking in to see if and when they will be coming to Adelaide, or indeed Australia, next. http://www.tga.nl/en
So, as an exclusive to The Adealide Festival, we got a ripper night of Shakespeare in avant garde style with audience participation and innocent bystanders weaved in.
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