“Hey, hello everyone.” Theater maker Steyn de Leeuwe walked onto the stage. “Well, I made a play and I wanted to show it. It is also good to say that during corona time… in psychiatry…” De Leeuwe never finishes the sentence, his attention is elsewhere: on an A4 sheet with a poem on it. He reads it out. When a beat starts playing, the performance flows effortlessly into a rap. “Who is crazy?” De Leeuwe concludes the opening scene. “Whoever says it should know.”
With his endearing mix of acting, poetry and music, De Leeuwe immediately draws the audience into his story and does not let go of the spectators until he has finished telling it. In his first one-man show, Tofu Cowboy, he focuses on the madness. For the performance, De Leeuwe drew on the experiences he gained during corona times when he could no longer work in the theater and looked for work in psychiatry. For a year he provided care to people who could not participate in society.
Colorful palette
On stage they take the form of three characters: the anxious Annie, the highly flammable Johan and the paranoid Harm. De Leeuwe also plays his forgetful father, the critical voice in his own head, the Tofu Cowboy from the title, and himself. He’s the one who brings that whole colorful palette of characters together.
Initially, De Leeuwe draws clear lines between his characters. They each have their own place on stage, with accompanying set pieces (an antique bench for Annie; a ladder for Johan; an easel for Harm) and characteristic background sounds. For example, Annie’s anxiety attacks are accompanied by the restless ticking of a clock and Johan’s outbursts of anger are accompanied by the sounds of a jackhammer.
As the performance progresses, those lines blur, culminating in the moment when De Leeuwe himself is confronted with a setback in his life. All the voices seem to have crept into his head and are shouting louder and louder at each other. The background sounds swell simultaneously as De Leeuwe drags the set pieces to the center of the stage and combines them into an island of madness, so that you wonder whether the characters really exist, or whether they are De Leeuwe’s own figments of the imagination. We have to wait until the Tofu Cowboy comes to rescue him with advice wrapped in horse metaphors, like a Texan deus ex machina.
Enlarged characters
Tofu Cowboy It is well put together and played even better. De Leeuwe lovingly brings each character to life. Their exaggerated characters regularly provide comic moments, but by letting the characters represent basic emotions – fear, anger, suspicion – De Leeuwe also makes them palpable. Just like the loneliness that De Leeuwe eventually admits to experiencing.
Who’s crazy? That question continues to reverberate when you leave the hall, while the closing song of the performance sounds again through the speakers. “Don’t run away,” De Leeuwe sings, “I don’t like to be alone.” Maybe madness lies in everyone to some extent, you might ultimately conclude. Then it makes a difference that you can share the craziness.