A new Hans Teeuwen is always an experience. Also with his ninth cabaret solo you experience the excitement in advance: something is always about to happen when Teeuwen enters the stage.
The expectations are fed because Teeuwen plays little. The previous show, Well then is from 2022, Real resentment from 2016 and Splinterwith which he returned to stage after seven years of absence from 2011. Since he became a leader in the cabaret, with companion Theo Maassen in the nineties, every next show feels like a new question of his originality.
Teeuwen is now 58 years old, a ripe age for the rowdige teenager he is essentially. But by The cowardly Savior he fills in the promise from the start. His sarcastic opening song about a savior who always does well, is a funny stab after the belief in a leader who dissolves everything. “The savior has the key to the gates of the dream kingdom.” Given the adoration of his unabated general public, it could just be about himself.
After which Teeuwen portrays himself as ‘a man of views’, and, very surprising, also about sport. This is followed by a wonderful persiflage, who starts as an expert who talks about football in obvious generalities, but becomes a well -oiled rader of derailing foolishly through other sports. Nice as he has serious ‘wise advice’ for bobsleighs: “guys, I understand that you want to go quickly. But pay attention to those turns.”
The story about his discovery of a forgotten book by Annie MG Schmidt is also a miracle of melia, in which the continuously repeating the nonsense title does half the battle. And in a long story about a man who becomes furious of the sea and dunes, Teeuwen spends a beachjutter who speaks in a self -made dialect, an inimitable word of words, which he translates to Dutch after every sentence. They are pieces in which the talent of Teeuwen sparkles and he takes you effortlessly, his rabbit hole in, after the wonderful world of his pleasant-cut brain.
Quickly hurt
There are pieces that work less well. He performs Agaath, a woman who gets upset when Teeuwen says she is bothered by the ‘humidity’ in warm weather. It turns out to be a cumbersome way to mock the spot with people who are hurt too quickly. Equally wide is the fantasy about an alternative series of violent Jumbo advertisements for Frank Lammers. The cowardly Savior Consists of a series of those long stories, and it is daring that Teeuwen takes time, but sometimes the joking density is low and a story feels slow.
It is sometimes also looking for the absurd madness that Teeuwen makes such a comedian of the outside category. His career is built in the way he is on stage: as the unaccountable clown, a man with countless tics and nonsensical, excessive ideas. All its extreme bone and coarseness could be traced back to this. For example, if he said he wanted to shoot the weak (in Hard and pathetic1994), then that was said by the labile, morbid boy he played at the time.
In The cowardly Savior He regularly acts as a storyteller, as himself. This creates space between him and the bizarre characters that he performs. That is an essential difference, so that the essential madness is sometimes missing. In part, that madness is still in his physical excesses, with departed faces and waving limbs, and in sputtering sounds, and weird voices. It is irresistible if he does endlessly opposite a visitor to his leipe dance and keeps repeating it challenging: “Why Don’t You Wanna Dance?“It feels like a patchwork when he chooses to just state what his theater persona is wrong: he calls himself a” fucking freak. ” In his previous show, Well thenhe did the same and described himself as “someone with serious mental problems.” The point is that the absurd only comes into its own when it is locked up in his game.
When he says that he used to be an Aryan activist, hostile about other breeds, he describes himself as “stupid as a shelf” at the time. That is also a way to put the narrator in a different light. It is also miserably explicitly the madness in a story in which he, also as a young man, was “the Genant” at parties of rich people. Teeuwen explains that he is genuinely held In places where the conversation stopped: with a demonstration of himself as a screaming pelvic tractor, he puts his own style on sale.
N-word
At times the artist gets traits from the man he is outside the stage, with views on current events, as he calls it. On social media he rages against Islam and, for example, calls many of the images from Gaza “fake” and the care of the genocide “hypocritical fashion.” That commentator takes over from the artist a number of times on stage, which means that the humor and ambiguity lose it.
For example, if he says he has burned two books, he says he does not reveal what the second book was. He pulls the scalse face of people who understand each other. It is a big nod to extreme right-wing Quran burns. And if he tells a story, in which it is, among other things, the intention of ridiculing the term ‘n-word’, he cannot resist the N-word to say in full. The bully in him likes to go borders. As he in With a Breierdeck (1995) Badining announced: “I do holy houses and taboos. But especially holy houses.” But that is only nice if it is packaged in a joke.
The choice of the final number is remarkable, in which he once again performs a sports expert. That is too much of a good thing. What does not remove that The cowardly Savior All in all more inspirers than predecessor Well thenthat routine was full of sex jokes. It is also not difficult to be mild for the aging artist who is Teeuwen. His approach has more uniqueness, more fire and more comical DNA than the majority of his colleagues. And as he sings triumphantly about himself: “I don’t make bad programs.”
In the meantime it is hoped that he will get the mind again and a program as complete and good as Real resentment manages to produce. Because he is now overtaken by a new generation of absurdists, for whom he is an example. At times, those young comedians are spare, faster and funnier than he is. The question is: can they reach his heights? And will they keep it up for so long?
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