‘On the Hope of Blessing’ grabs you by the hand and won’t let you go

As a critic you occasionally have to be confronted with your prejudices – in this case skepticism about performing classical repertoire without modernizing it. Why use a living art form like theater to pretend it’s the seventeenth or eighteenth century? Why not use the contemporary gaze to look again at that distant past – creating an interesting exchange between past and present?

It is therefore as swallowing as it was in the opening minutes of Hoping for the best (1900) in a new staging of Dood Paard it appears that the text by the Dutch playwright Herman Heijermans is played in its entirety. The Amsterdam company alternates between its own pieces and the revival of repertoire, and in recent years the latter increasingly seemed to be a dead end..

But after a somewhat rough start, in which it takes some getting used to the outdated, common language, the piece grabs you by the hand and won’t let you go. Heijermans wrote an angry indictment against the exploitation of fishermen by the shipping companies. Although over the years the melodrama of the play came first, Dood Paard breathes new life into the revolutionary impetus.

Also read: The brat was right

Claustrophobic decor

The company achieves this without changing much of Heijermans’ 123-year-old text. Due to the unsentimental playing style and the claustrophobic setting, in which the characters are caught in a gigantic fishing net, social injustice naturally comes to the surface.

This starts with the traumatized ex-marine Geert, who was recruited as a minor to put down the local population’s uprising in blood during the war in Aceh. He is portrayed with chilling, hollow-eyed damnation by Joachim Robbrecht, who manages to find a heartbreaking core of resistance in his character.

His great opponent is the ship owner Bos, who knowingly allows Geert and ten other fishermen to embark on a ‘floating coffin’, and avoids any responsibility for the resulting tragedy through unscrupulous abuse of power. Kuno Bakker gives Bos a sacred conviction in his own right and chosen position – rarely have I hated a stage character so with every fiber in my body.

The most famous character of Hoping for the best, Kniertje, is crushed between her love for her sons and her loyalty to law. Because Manja Topper portrays her with her usual harshness, she is also saved from sentiment, and she comes to symbolize a generational conflict: children and young people who see what is wrong with the world, but are sent to the slaughterhouse by their parents because ‘that’s just the way the world is’.

By playing out with utmost precision the class inequality that lies at the heart of Heijermans’ piece, Dood Paard breathes new life into the piece – precisely by returning to the author’s original intentions.