Last year I joined the circus in the summer, this year I traveled with the birds.
I’ve been rehearsing a play on a field on Terschelling for a week and besides the whistling of the burning sun I’ve already heard a blackbird, a cuckoo and a lark. All those birds help get our play right. There are a hundred and one bees here, but no one has been stung, the birds have driven the honey-makers precisely from our feet.
However, there are midges (small mosquitoes), harvestmen (giant mosquitoes), lots of wind that blows our decor away. And of course I have a headache, because I sleep on the couch because my opponent snores. That’s all worth it. For the Oerol festival I am making a play about a Spanish poet who, almost a hundred years ago, on a boat between Cuba and Spain, wrote a play out of heartbreak and we are now performing that play.
The play is actually completely unplayable
Or rather, we’re stepping it up a bit. Because that poet was not heartbroken for just anyone, but for the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí (the one with the moustache), the piece is rather strange to say the least, in fact completely unplayable.
I play with two of my dearest friends and with the three of us we play a director, a Romeo, a Juliet, a red nude, two men with beards, two poets with wigs, a moon, a sunfish, a man with an egg for a head , a magician, a tap dancer, a priest with a lizard tail, a boy in love with the Titanic, a black horse, a white horse, a group of horses, a group of barbecuing men and three shepherds lying at night.
Playing all those roles, all that dressing up in the old goat cart that we were allowed to borrow for a case of beer, makes me very happy.
Dead poets are not dead, they are in their collected works
Why? Because that poet with heartbreak is also in the play. That is not possible, because he was shot in 1936 by the fascists, but still, he is in it. For although no recording of his lectures, which must have been great, has survived, there is one recording of the poet playing dreamily on a slightly out of tune piano.
Every time one of us reads a poem by the poet in the performance, we play that music. No one in the audience can know that it is him, but we know and we know that we are not playing a play with the three of us, but with the four of us, no, his play.
Dead poets are not dead. They sit in their collected works, play paper violin, are paper birds. The forest in which we play is large, the island much larger. Of course there are speakers aimed at the audience, they must be able to understand his texts well. But we have hidden one speaker in the woods so that when we play our play, the birds of the island can hear it.
Today we read poems to the birds, tomorrow they whistle the repetitive piano tune of a lovesick poet.