“I will try to explain it to you,” Jozef van den Berg tells his audience in De Singel in Antwerp, on that particular September 14, 1989 at five to eight in the evening. ‘I will never play again. I have approached a reality that can no longer be played.’
The audience thinks it is part of his performance Enough waiting and starts laughing. “You still think that what I say is not true,” Van den Berg responds. ‘You are wrong and that is the deceptive thing about theatre. Theater is false. (…) I seek reality and can no longer say things that are not true for me. I say hello to you all. My theater life is over. I’m going. Good luck to you all. You can get the money back at the cash register. Bye.’
It’s no joke: after that historic evening, puppeteer Jozef van den Berg does indeed withdraw from the theater, leaving his many fans in shock. Six months later he meets a blind Orthodox priest in Greece, who makes it clear to him that his calling lies in Orthodox Christianity, in a retired life full of silence and contemplation. In 1991 he left his wife and four children.
Bicycle storage
After a short wandering he ends up in the North Brabant village of Neerijnen, where he first stays in a public bicycle shed. Because the security forces wanted him removed, he moved to a doorless hut in the garden of a family friend. There, Van den Berg would lead a secluded life with his birds for decades, while in the meantime he prayed to God and maintained the garden of the aging couple.
“If you had seen him once, you wanted to see everything about him,” is how Marc Maillard of the Antwerp figure theater FroeFroe remembers him as a puppeteer. “He was a kind of guru, you had to be one believer be when you saw him. His work had great spiritual power. Now we would call him a stand-up comedian, but in the style of Wim Helsen: someone who, in addition to the jokes, also brings deeper content.”
He held a mirror up to the audience with homemade dolls such as Wallet, Mrs. the Witch and Pietje the Caterpillar. “He talked about heavy themes such as loneliness and materialism,” said Maillard. “He took children very seriously, completely different from the children’s and puppet theater we had at the time. In doing so, he influenced an entire generation of theater makers, including FroeFroe.”
Van den Berg made sixteen performances, some of which were also broadcast on television by the VPRO. The interactivity of his theater was especially special, he played with the audience in front of him.
In August Van den Berg left his cabin, this time permanently. He spent his last days in the Orthodox monastery in Sochos, near Thessaloniki in Greece. He died there and is buried there.