Poetic dance scenes, breathtaking decor and sometimes a lack of urgency at Boslab Theater Festival

According to the organization, the Boslab Theater Festival in the Amsterdamse Bos gives visitors the opportunity to marvel for an evening, to enjoy or to be annoyed by the versatile and slightly absurd performances of young makers. That is promising. After starting on an attractive terrace in the middle of the forest, we follow the color of one of the five routes (each covering three short performances).

Now death

Route Groen starts in the huge open-air theater with the play Now death. The audience takes place on the stage and looks out onto an empty stand. There, high at the top, the writer Molière, flashy yet convincingly brought to life by Teun Donders, introduces one of his creations: his hypochondriac character Argan from An imagined sick person. Here he is reduced to some sort of athletic ape-man who clambers across the stands and obediently performs tricks.

While Argan’s physical performance makes us laugh here and there, Molière tells (with a little too much of it) why our society, obsessed with health and caution, is bankrupt. The monologue is just too long to keep you interested, but director Reinout Bongers scores points by letting the actors make thorough use of the terrain and treating us to poetic dance scenes.

Ode to the refusal

The performance is slightly smaller, but extremely charmingly acted Ode to the refusal, whose decor and lighting will immediately take your breath away. On a fallen tree trunk above a wide ditch stands a skittish Ophelia, wonderfully played by the Flemish Axelle Verkempinck. Ophelia doesn’t feel like committing suicide today: ‘I should have done it already. Can you be tired of dying too often? Maybe I want babies, or a gym membership, or a traffic ticket.”

Her partner in crime is the Greek Medea (Marit Koomen), who refuses to be labeled as a child murderer (“the writer says so much”). It’s admirable how the two broke away from the male perspective without going into too much detail (and jump into the ditch without hesitation). We forgive the final direction that a tree here and there blocks the view, after all, we are at the mercy of nature.

The Cruel Mother

When the sun has finally set, we are led via a dark path to a field between the trees, where two women also try to get off the beaten track. In The Cruel Mother end director Erasmus Mackenna has the witch and Grietje (without Hans) largely sitting at a table squabbling about their roles. Once again two literary figures announce that they want to shake off their age-old narrative. Only this time the urgency remains unclear, so that the piece remains somewhat insignificant, no matter how enchanting actresses Ellie de Lange and Marit Hooijschuur also play.

At the Boslab Theater Festival we were little annoyed, largely entertained and sometimes surprised about the level of the up-and-coming theater talent.