Departing director Ivo van Hove has always made theater an experience

It is the end of an era that lasted 22 years. On Wednesday, Ivo van Hove announced his departure as artistic director at International Theater Amsterdam (ITA). He will remain associated with the company as a director and advisor. “It’s time for a new phase in my life.” Van Hove says he wants to have more time for his productions abroad. In addition, he will be the new intendant at the Ruhrtriennale for the period 2024-2026, starting November 1 this year.

His departure seems a logical step. Van Hove is 64 years old and has been a sought-after director abroad for many years. In addition to his international productions, he has already directed hardly more than one production per year for his own company, and that seems unlikely to change.

Moreover, 22 years is an unprecedentedly long time to lead the largest and richest theater company in the country. As someone who propagated “a punk mentality” in the eighties and started his career kicking the Flemish theater establishment, he must have sensed that it was time to give others a chance. The fact that a worthy replacement is ready in the Norwegian director Eline Arbo makes it easier for him to hand over the baton.

In those 22 years of directorship, he grew into a prominent director with an inestimable value for Dutch theatre.

In 2001, Van Hove became director of what was then still called Toneelgroep Amsterdam. After a turbulent start, with unrest and changes in the ensemble, he established his reputation as a director of a magnificent, controversial and multifaceted oeuvre, in which unforgettable marathon performances (Roman tragedies and kings of war), sublime film adaptations (Opening night, Scenes from a wedding) and grand book edits (The Fountainheadthe Couperustrilogy) jumped out.

Thanks to the role video image played in his work, he was hailed as a theater innovator. Internationally, he became a sought-after director, working with numerous world stars, including David Bowie, Isabelle Huppert, Bryan Cranston, Jude Law and Juliette Binoche. He also successfully directed musicals and operas.

Experience

The intensity of his work is unparalleled. Although he will be the first to admit that not every performance is a direct hit, Van Hove’s theater is always an experience: with intense, great emotions, visual spectacle, elegant design and expressive acting. Thanks to Jan Versweyveld, his scenographer and partner, the drama is given a highly stylized, often monumental space. Although Van Hove also directed beautiful, intimate monologues, he flourishes particularly in the main auditorium. He knows how to fill it like no other, in a way that leaves your eyes and ears short.

By using live video, he adds a second viewing layer. The spectator is often offered close-ups, while the scene remains visible as a whole. In his direction of The Damned (after Visconti’s film) cameras were hidden in the coffins that showed how the dead also expressed fear and anger in their coffins.

With such inventions, Van Hove inexorably removes theater from any form of dusty realism. Although his storming of the senses, in a country where less is often seen as more, is not undisputed. Van Hove can be immoderate, with extreme drama and a flood of theatrical resources, and that regularly leads to criticism.

In a country where less is often seen as more, he was not undisputed

Yet, partly thanks to an ensemble with only top actors, he almost always manages to bring recognizable people with palpable emotions to the stage. The emotion is more in the physical game than in the spoken words. He himself calls it a crucial “misunderstanding about theatre”, in the whole world, that the text is sacred. Psychology is a matter of body language, he believes. “There is not only the language of the text, there is also the language of the body.”

This was visible, among other things, in his gracious Couperus-trilogy. To be over Little souls wrote NRC: “Happiness shines in intimate, physical moments. The bodies say what the words cannot reach.”

Van Hove is therefore not an outspoken psychological director. He calls himself a “behavioral director”. Someone who wonders how people behave in a situation when they are confronted with it. There is psychology behind it, but based on the information the piece provides. Contrary to what is often considered necessary, he does not invent a life story and personality for a character outside of the play. As he said in an interview with NRC: “Then you get actors who say: ‘My character would never do that.’ Then I say, ‘Oh? Have you met Mr. Hamlet yet?’ Where do you get that from?”

Glorious

With his working method he created images of poignant beauty and peeled off man’s masks to penetrate to his core. This was particularly striking in his adaptation of A little lifeone of the best performances of the past decade: “Theatre in its most glorious form,” wrote NRC.

The emotional punch of this “sweltering, Dantesque hell journey” was due to the strong story, but also to the way in which he found a rhythm to show unfiltered pain and suffering and to let love shine in cracks of sunbeams alongside the dominant evil. He makes his universal themes – death, sex, love, politics – touchable. And isn’t that what theater is all about?

In 2021, NRC participated in one of Ivo van Hove’s monster productions for seven weeks. Read here: Seven weeks behind the scenes at Age of Rage by Ivo van Hove

A version of this article also appeared in the June 15, 2023 issue of the newspaper.