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Massive rain rigs, UV cum, and naked roller-skating: Frank Peschier and Natasha Tripney talk ‘European Theatre’

Giovanni’s Room, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. Photo: Fabian Calis

Frank Peschier: I have something to confess ahead of us diving into this chat Natasha, I feel a terrible fraud. Despite having made theatre and knowing quite a bit about it through my career as a dramaturg (and let’s be honest, it’s a huge slice of my identity pie chart alongside ‘has stupid hair’ and ‘hates camping’), I feel that the majority of my European theatre knowledge is founded on your incredible Cafe Europa Substack, and the inherent reverence for the Berliner Ensemble that you can’t get graduate a drama degree without. Yes, there’s the cool shit that makes it to the Barbican or BAC, plus the occasional West End Ostermeiers and Van Hoves, but otherwise there’s a bit of a gap in my brain where I feel my references should be.

I love the idea of building a trip around seeing a show (don’t ask me how much I’ve spent following Nick Cave across Europe. That’s between me and my credit score). I was googling the Zurich flight prices to see if I could justify getting to Jaz Woodcock Stewart’s sexy as hell looking The Glass Menagerie at Theatre Basel, and I’ll never stop pitching ‘Frank takes the train to see the singing trains at Starlight Express Theater Bochum’ (Come on Grazia, call me). So when I saw Internationaal Theater Amsterdam artistic director Eline Arbo was staging one of my favourite novellas, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, there and Eurostar was having a sale, I thought fuck it. As I’d lusted over photos of her beautiful The End of Eddy at ITA, and had already read a fair bit about The Years, I thought I had a clear idea of what to expect – but I was blown away. We’re talking dancer-like physicality, the narrator David and his lover Giovanni drowning in each other, sometimes literally thanks to the ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE RAIN RIG. There’s live music, a 360-degree dolly, a full bar set that appears to float away up into the flies. There’s nakedness, both contextual and surreal, with a character delivering a heart-rending speech for an elongated period in a tiny tin bath. It’s slick, it's a bit weird and it feels on a different level.

Natasha Tripney: I guess it’s worth starting off by saying that when we’re talking about European theatre we’re not talking about a homogenous thing – we devoted many, many words to this topic on Exeunt during lockdown – but, in the UK, we generally use it as shorthand for the slice of well-resourced western/central European theatre we’re occasionally permitted to glimpse, with Arbo one of the favoured few directors whose work makes it to our shores.

The End of Eddy, ITA. Photo: Dim Balsem

I’m kind of gutted that The Years has become known as the-show-that-makes-people-faint, as that has eclipsed discussion of her as a director. So I am glad you got the opportunity to see her on her home turf. The show that really did it for me was her take on The End of Eddy, a novel that is far from a favourite of mine – but her staging was amazing, fragmenting the protagonist between the four performers and staging everything in an expandable tent as a kind of gig. Albeit one featuring a mutual masturbation scene where everyone ended up covered in UV cum.

I also enjoyed her take on The Laws, a novel of one woman’s journey of sexual self-discovery, which is apparently massive in the Netherlands. I particularly enjoyed the scene in which the protagonist, a young PhD student, capers round the stage holding pages of her thesis over her crotch before inviting her lover to plant his face in it. And the final gesture in which the entire contents of the stage – furniture, books, discarded underwear – gets swept into the air in a giant canvas sack and suspended above the stage.

Frank: There’s the obvious flashy budget elephant in the room (I tried to work out how much that rain effect cost and fell down a hire-quotes rabbit hole. Anyway, the crane's coming Thursday). But also … when I visited ITA, it was packed by a mixed, mainly young crowd, with great seats available throughout the run from €15. The whole place is buzzy, the bar and cafe invites you to linger, there’s a vending machine with books, oh look the bar is opening late tonight with a free lecture... Arbo, I think in a gesture that is more prevalent in European theatre, is a director whose respect for the text is evident in her not needing to be precious or reliant on it. The concentration is on creating how it feels, the mise en scene, the experience as a whole – and that extends to her practice as an artistic director. The building feels like an Arbo show: it’s just really bloody cool.

The Years at The Almeida. Photo: Ali Wright

Despite 52% and my stupid new blue passport, we are still, geographically at least, European. My question I think is are we as a nation more conservative in how representative, or maybe literal we want our theatre to be – or do we not believe our audiences can handle it? And if we are making that assumption, who and what are we missing out on? Are we making a false divide between what we think of as a ‘good night out’ show and ‘alternative’ work?