Annemarie Prins achieved great fame with her company Theater Terzijde, founded in 1965; she gave the political, committed theater an important artistic meaning. In her direction and acting style there was plenty of room for grand effects, theatrical enlargement and even the surreal. Annemarie Margaretha Prins, born in 1932 in Amsterdam, died on Tuesday at the age of 93.
Before she became professionally involved in the theater, Prins trained as an actor at the Arnhem Theater School. She soon turned her attention to directing. She traveled to Poland to become acquainted with the expressionist theater of a director like Jerzy Grotowski. Here she discovered the importance of the human voice as a musical part of a performance.
The name of the company, ‘aside’, sounds a bit modest, but the commitment was anything but. Although her group only existed for four years, Terzijde’s impact was great. When she made a program about the Spanish poet Gabriel García Lorca in the 1990s, she chose the motto: ‘A passionate indictment of everything that destroys life.’
These words serve as a leitmotif for her work. The piece was called El Paseothe journey or the walk. In the Spanish Civil War this was synonymous with taking someone to execution. The performance took place on the location of a new, still bare theater space in Amsterdam. Also in the early 1990s, Prins organized a solidarity action for artists in Sarajevo, which was severely affected by war.
Rebellion
Such initiatives characterized Prins’s theater work. She explicitly looked for new paths, with engagement, on-location theater and collage theater. She used the repertoire in a socially critical manner, such as in her rigid adaptation of Leonce and Lena by the German writer Georg Büchner, a satirical piece about a king and queen as childish rulers. But in the meantime, there is a lot of danger in their so-called naivety. In addition to being a director, Prins was also an actress, writer of texts and novels and she performed in numerous films and plays.
There is a compelling combination of compassion and indictment, even rebellion, in everything she did. In 1994 she was seen in Before retirement (For the Ruhestand) by the Austrian Thomas Bernhard, an extremely grim play about a brother who dresses up as a Nazi once a year, on Heinrich Himmler’s birthday; he and his one sister are convinced Nazis. The other sister, Clara, confined to a wheelchair due to a spinal cord injury, watches this game in horror, but she can barely speak. Prins played that role sublimely.
In the 2008 season she was a guest at Summer guests from the VPRO and told interviewer Bas Heijne about her idealism in the theater; she traveled to Cambodia to make a performance with actresses about the Pol Pot regime. This was characteristic of Prins: making theater on the spot, away from the safety of the theater.
From the 1990s onwards she started acting again, including in monologues Harmoniehof (1997) about the suffocating world of the small neighborhood in Amsterdam South (‘a village in a city’); this monologue formed the basis for her partly autobiographical novel Self-control (2002). The performance was awarded the Albert van Dalsum Prize.
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‘Theater can express the many sides of death’
Her performance at the Noord Nederlands Toneel was compelling with the performance about lung cancer death and all that…(2017; text Sophie Kassies), deliberately with a small initial letter. There are sentences that made the viewer shudder, such as this: ‘I like him, my cancer. It’s a bad one, one that never heals.’ And this one: ‘I want to die while I’m still Annemarie.’ Prins, in her very autobiographical role, asks for a ‘dignified end of life’, she has signed the euthanasia declaration.
She achieved great fame on television with the role of a stubborn woman in the series Old Money (1998-1999). She also appeared in numerous films, including Atlantis (2008) by Digna Sinke. The performance death and all that…originated in the Ardennes during filming of Secrets of War (2014), when Annemarie Prins told her colleague Eva Duijvestein (1976) about her illness while waiting on the set at night. In the performance, Prins’s solo ended with the ‘cancer appearing to have been cured for the time being’.
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