Comedians Margôt Ros and Randy Fokke draw a lot of humor from the polarized debate on De Parade ★★★★☆

Anyone who thinks that the war in Ukraine is far away at the sunny theater festival De Parade in the Westbroekpark in The Hague is wrong. ‘Vladimir Putin’ is one of the news themes snatched from a glass bowl of balls in The Big Actualities Tombola† This highly entertaining comedy is set in a hairdressing salon, where the popular hairdresser Mandy (Randy Fokke) and her intellectual client Willemijn (Margôt Ros) discuss current affairs.

Every so often a piece of paper with a news topic is snatched from the bowl. This is followed by a new scene with dialogues from the sharp pen of Nathan Vecht (to be co-writer of drama series The year of Fortuyn†

Those conversations go more or less as you would expect: hairdresser Mandy gets all her information from social media and comes up with one-liners such as ‘you have two camps and there is something to be said for both’, while Willemijn, who is quick on her toes, loves literature. and podcasts about science. With the bold playing of comediennes Ros and Fokke, so much humor is drawn from the polarized social debate.

A good addition is guitarist and singer Levi Manner, who connects the scenes with parodies of the music of Spinvis and Guus Meeuwis, among others. There are also some successful surprises built into the script, making this half hour fly by.

Of an entirely different, more serious order, is the story told in a smaller theater tent. In Erkel’s hope anthropologist Arjan Erkel (52) has adapted the history of his much-discussed hostage-taking into a fascinating documentary-theatre. The former MSF employee was kidnapped in 2002 by Chechen rebels and held in the Russian state of Dagestan for 607 days.

In the performance, Erkel in the Adidas tracksuit of the time sits in a rectangle that represents his captivity. Erkel quickly tells about this unimaginable experience, with harsh and sometimes wryly witty details. For a change there is music by Jan Wilm Tolkamp, ​​former guitarist of the band Normaal. the hit Oerend Hard appears to have played a special role during the hostage crisis.

Erkel has previously toured theaters with a long version of this performance, but his story is effective in the compressed form of thirty minutes. It is a special experience to listen to Erkel’s oppressive story and his message about hope and freedom, while you hear through the tent cloth how the Parade visitors are enjoying themselves outside with cheerful music, food and drinks.