From the age of 8, Jack has been abused by his stepfather. First in the changing room of the swimming pool, later also in the bedroom at home when his mother was at work. That went from bad to worse, and even to the point that as an adolescent he was offered to other men by his stepfather for payment. Jack was so damaged that he had to drop out of school, end up in a boarding school and from there he ended up in prostitution.
He was one of the guys recruited by a modern breed of pimps who didn’t shy away from bringing young boys from Eastern Europe to the Netherlands under false pretenses to put them to work as escorts in clubs and underground brothels.
Theater maker Gerardjan Rijnders met Jack on a dating site and at first had no idea that he was dealing with a former escort boy. Rijnders became interested in him and eventually had five long conversations with him. He distilled his theater text from this snail. Together with actor Thijs Prein and designer Roelof Pothuis, they considered creating a performance. Jack didn’t like it at first, but he finally agreed.
snail experienced the first public performance as part of Pride Amsterdam last Saturday. It is an incredibly intense story about a completely destroyed life, from which perseverance and maybe even a kind of zest for life, or rather anger for life, shines through. A song that keeps coming back in the performance is I Will Survivein the jazzy version by Nils Landgren.
Jack’s story is merciless: full of blood and sperm, rape, abuse, torture and humiliation, from the age of 8 to 20, after which he decided to go into prostitution himself. The world he depicts is as violent as it is dark; Jack describes himself as a business model with two holes in it. His story is so gruesome that in detail it is reminiscent of the novel A small life by Hanya Yanagihara.
What also makes the monologue remarkable and especially spicy is that Jack tells frankly about the men who used the (often underage) boys, including prominent figures from politics, the judiciary and other high-ranking people. He also claims that the police are either unable or unwilling to get to grips with it. During the discussion last Saturday, first publicly, then one-on-one, it was also about how reliable Jack’s personal story is. After such a tormented life, hasn’t the man come to believe in all kinds of conspiracy theories? Rijnders emphasizes that his text is a theater text, not investigative journalism or scientific study.
Rijnders: ‘It is the story of that one man, who I do not consider a fantasist at all. It took him forty years to tell this. It may not be 100 percent true, but at least 70 percent. He told me the names of those prominent figures, yes, and to be honest I wasn’t surprised. We deliberately left them out in the performance. It is up to the public to decide for themselves whether they want to believe this or not.’
Thijs Prein: ‘snail is not a moralistic argument against prostitution. For me it is mainly about making it clear that human trafficking does not only happen on the border of Belarus, but also here, in Amsterdam canal houses and cellars. We want to show how that business operates and what kind of misery those guys have to go through there.’
The theater makers hope that their performance will be seen by as many people as possible. Theaters are hesitant for now snail to be programmed: ‘What does the public in Zwolle want with such an intense story?’ That is why Rijnders and Prein hope to convince programmers of its importance with these first performances. In the performance, Jack tells us that once a journalist from New Revue dived into the escort underworld, but eventually ended his search.
Jack hasn’t seen the performance yet. He doesn’t want that either. He thinks it’s scary. And it might also be bloody linked. Rijnders: ‘It remains tricky for him, because people from that circuit will recognize his story and him and then you don’t know what the consequences could be.’ If Jack should decide to go anyway, he listens to a text that, despite the horror, is cleverly constructed as a litany of evil, and he sees an actor who tells his story with unparalleled understated and poignant. This is documentary theater without frills, but with great impact.
Jack is now well into his 40s and is still involved in prostitution, especially in the sm scene. Closing sentence off snail: ‘And well, yesterday, that guy with the needles through my nipples, that’s 200 euros and those are for me again.’
snail by Gerardjan Rijnders (text and direction), Thijs Prein (concept and acting) and Roelof Pothuis (design) can still be seen on 1/8 and 6/8 in Parool Theater Amsterdam; tour follows.
Gerardjan Rijnders (73) – artistic director of Toneelgroep Amsterdam from 1987 to 2000, then freelance theater maker – and Thijs Prein (35) know each other from a workshop on Shakespeare that Prein attended at the Toneelschool at the time and which was supervised by Rijnders. After that they worked together with the young group De Hollanders, and with some free productions by Hummelinck Stuurman at the time. Then they founded Kat op het Bacon, which now also produces Snail.