Sublime minimalism: that is the best characterization you could give to the Flemish stage and film actor Johan Leysen. One of his most impressive roles was that of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in the performance Wittgenstein Incorporated (1989). Later he also acted in a number of French and English-language films, including van The American (2010) from Anton Corbijn and Youth and Jolie (2013) to the recent Netflix movie Noise (2023). On Thursday, March 30, Leysen suddenly died of cardiac arrest. He was 73 years old.
Leysen was born on February 19, 1950 in Hasselt and graduated at the age of 24 from the Studio Herman Teirlinck in Antwerp. He was the twin brother of curator and festival director Frie Leysen, responsible for the Brussels Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Soon after graduating, Leysen entered the Dutch theater world and joined the then legendary Toneelgroep Baal in Amsterdam. In a long interview with the Belgian magazine Etcetera, he mentioned the group “cool, furious and anarchic”.
It was mainly German-language authors such as Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Heiner Müller and Botho Strauss to whom Leysen felt attracted. He himself played in Müllers Medea material, an extremely complicated text. So was his 1989 Wittgenstein performance, written by the Dutch playwright Peter Verburgt. The monologue was based on lecture notes by Wittgenstein and notes by the audience. The latter in particular made the performance sublime and unforgettable. Leysen sat on a low wooden chair with a too long body, neatly wearing a tie and jacket. Jan Ritsema directed what was then called a “thinking exercise in acting”. The performance was as much a philosophical treatise as it was a meticulous description of a lecture hall annex theater stage.
Jean Luc Godard
Leysen’s oeuvre is unprecedentedly extensive, both in and outside the theatre. In total, he appeared in 170 films and series. As a stage actor in the Netherlands, he was associated with De Appel, the Publiekstheater and the Ro Theater in addition to Baal. In Flanders he participated in performances by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Het Toneelhuis.
In 1985 Leysen was offered by the French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard to play in Je vous salue, Marie. Godard appreciated Leysen’s musical, sonorous text treatment. He had to work hard for that, he said in an interview. Precisely “playing in French has taught me the concern to formulate clearly, and also to let the language do its work”.
Read also this review of the movie Pink Moon with Johan Leysen (2022)
Leysen played in numerous Dutch films, including The girl with the red hair (1981), as resistance hero Frans, and in Lattice father (1995) for which he received a nomination for a Golden Calf as Best Actor. He later received the Golden Calf for his leading role in Felice… Felice… (1998) by Peter Delpeut.
Leysen was remarkably modest about his career. He called his development as an actor the result of a “series of chance encounters.” One of his last performances was in 2019 at NTGent in the performance Orestes in Mosul. At the initiative of director Milo Rau, Leysen traveled with Elsie de Brauw and Bert Luppes to heavily affected Mosul, where they played with Iraqi actors and musicians in places full of war scars. Leysen was impressive in his role as Greek army commander Agamemnon. The sublime minimalism of his diction was grand, sober and penetrating.