Director, writer and actor Ger Thijs will be remembered for his sense of tasteful subtlety. The performances he made, both as a writer and director, had a high degree of craftsmanship combined with sincerity. Irony was foreign to him.
His piece Down the rivers (2002) is a good example of this: it is about a father who has died and the son who wants to scatter his ashes. But then suddenly the father walks calmly into the garden. At the premiere at Het Toneel Speelt, Hans Croiset played the father and Thijs the son. Thijs himself called the performance: “Simple but pure, and close to yourself. Two men and an urn, actors and stuff, that’s what the stage is all about.”
Ger Thijs had been ill for some time. He died of Parkinson’s on February 6 at the age of 74.
He was born on May 15, 1948 in Waubach, South Limburg, studied psychology in Amsterdam for a short time and decided to transfer to the Maastricht Theater Academy. That too was short-lived: stage director Elise Hoomans asked him after two years for the Arnhemse Toneelgroep Theater. Here he debuted on September 27, 1970 Look, it doesn’t say what it saysa school program to Exercises of style by Raymond Queneau. Thijs provided the translation and acted as an actor.
With this performance, Thijs set the tone for all his later work. He translated plays and devoted himself to Dutch-language theatre. He adapted novels by Louis Couperus (Elaine Vere and The silent force), Frederick of Eden (From the cool lakes of death), Hella S. Haasse (Gentlemen of the tea), Multatuli (Max Havelaar) and F. Bordewijk (Character). Theaterbureau Hummelinck Stuurman released no less than 17 of his performances. His adaptations were never ‘just’ retellings of the book, he chose a new angle that told a new story. Like in The silent power, which he called “eminent drama.” Thijs is credited with having discovered the theater writer in Couperus.
In 1988 he made a glowing adaptation of it Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, the first performance by the new Hague company Het Nationale Toneel, directed by Franz Marijnen. Thijs was the artistic director of this company for a while (until 2001).
For Ger Thijs, family relationships were the true theme of the theatre, or, as he himself put it: ‘Family sorrow is the core of all dramas. Father, mother, children: those are the primal relationships.”
His love for the elegant purity of the theater regularly brought him into conflict with a new generation of directors, who wanted more spectacle. In polemical pieces he wrote as a columnist for de Volkskrant he stated his position more than once.
He devoted himself not only to making theatre, but also to writing novels. He debuted in 1984 with The crying man in which he made prose from the dialogue art of the theatre. Are A strong decline (2002) portrayed a theater director who is suddenly dismissed. This novel of keys is set in the Koninklijke Schouwburg called the Thalia Theater, where a two-year renovation has seriously damaged the stylish interior: in Thijs’s vision, an excessive light installation hangs from the beautiful, gold-inlaid ceiling and the chairs, which were once beige, are a dead matte gray. Anger, polemic, reckoning and merriment alternate in this stage novel, the Among professors of the theatre.
Some of Thijs’ own pieces, such as Down the riversthe intimate love portrait The kiss and The light in the eyes were nominated for the Theater Audience Award.
After the premiere Fame Thijs was appointed Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion in the Leidsche Schouwburg on 22 December 2017 for his services to the theatre.