It is September 14, 1989 in the Antwerp theater, five minutes before eight. Puppeteer and playwright Jozef van den Berg enters and tells the audience that the performance is canceled. Enough Waiting the performance would be called, a variation on Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. That afternoon, Van den Berg testifies, God “called” him. He will never perform again from this moment on.
It is one of the most striking events in Dutch theater. 40,000 tickets were sold and the public can get their money back. Until then, Van den Berg was considered one of the greatest puppeteers in our country, who performed for both children and adults. He was one of the first to remove the front curtain from the puppet theater, so that he and his puppets were visible as a player on stage.
Van den Berg died last week in Greece, in the Orthodox Transfiguration Monastery in Sochos, not far from Thessaloniki. He was 74 years old. He was born on August 22, 1949 in Beers (North Brabant) and wanted to become a priest as a child. At a young age he played the role of a Pharisee in a passion play by Cuijk. During his high school years he was active in school theater. In 1960 he attended drama school in Arnhem for two years. After his marriage, the couple went to live in Groningen, where he applied for assistance to travel through the country by horse and cart and perform traveling puppet theatre. One of his children is Lotte van den Berg, a director herself.
Bicycle shed
Even more than through his theater, Van den Berg achieved national fame through his conversion to the Orthodox Church. He lived as a hermit in a bicycle shed near the town hall of Neerijnen in Gelderland, a place that “God had shown him”, as he said. emphasized several times in interviews. Afterwards he stayed in a self-built hut and chapel, where he received people who were struggling with religious issues.
Yet it would do him no honor to put his theater work in the background since he, in his own words, “became an actor for Christ.” Performances like Moeke and the Fool (Holland Festival, 1980), The Lovers (1986/1987) and The Plaster Place (1988/1989) are undisputed highlights in theater. Mainly The Lovers showed in the bud Van den Berg’s later conversion, in which he embodied his alter ego Jozef who was always searching, never at home anywhere, always on the road. Apart from the beautiful, homemade glove puppets that the player handled, one of his most important attributes was a large wooden box with a semi-circular lid. His dolls lived in there. In an impressive and at the same time defenseless way, he brought his puppets to life and spoke to them.
Altar
The same coffin formed the center of Van den Berg’s life after the theater. He stored his belongings in it and turned it into an altar. His farewell was so special because he let the audience know in a long, poetically formulated text that he was looking for the truth that he could no longer find in the theater: “I cannot tell the same story here every evening. I seek reality. I can no longer say things that are not true for me. (-) My theater life is over in that respect. I’m going.”
In Enough Waiting Van den Berg made use of it Stabat Mater by Vivaldi, sung by Aafje Heynis. The performance was proof of his conversion. He himself played an actor waiting for a writer’s text. But Jozef van den Berg himself was the writer, so the text would never be written.