How do you make a theater of the Benefits Affair? Theater company Likeminds asked playwright Maxine Palit de Jongh to consider that question. It led to the moving performance Fightwhich was nominated for the BNG Bank Theater Prize 2023 and also received a nomination for the Theo d’Or for leading actor Nadia Amin. Fight zooms in on a fictional victim of the affair and shows how she, like thousands of Dutch people, unfairly ends up in the trap of debt restructuring. She loses everything she loves.
It is not the first time that the story, which mainly appeared in the news as a series of abstract figures, has been told in a more human way. The compelling documentary was released in 2021 Only against the state (BNNVARA), in which director Stijn Bouma gave five victims of the Benefits Affair the opportunity to speak. The danger of zooming in on such a handful of people involved is that you give viewers who are not victims themselves the opportunity to see these women as the unfortunate exception to the rule. That they become private stories. Very sad, very tragic, but not something you should relate to as an outsider. Bouma, however, does not give the viewer the opportunity to take such a safe position in relation to the theme. It is always felt that what happens to these mothers could have happened to anyone.
De Jongh chose to focus her text on the institutional racism exposed by the affair. “This play is about two characters: a mother, Zafirah, and a daughter, Nishreen,” are the first words of actress Nadia Amin, who had to perform the premiere from a wheelchair due to a broken foot, after which she immediately drops the theme: “Zafirah is played by a person of color.” Bam. When, towards the end of the performance, exhausted, Zafirah looks at her two passports, she wonders how she could ever believe that she was Dutch.
Blue envelope
It all starts very pleasantly, you could almost say boring. Amin’s character, mother of two, has a good job, she lives in a nice house with nice furniture, and is unsure between a holiday in nature or on the coast. A blue envelope falls on the mat. And another one. And then it goes quickly. You have to shower at school. Eating with the neighbors. “My baby does not have a crinkle book but a blue envelope.” The gas is turned off. Ultimately, inevitably: the children are removed from the home. “I am a bad mother,” Zafirah screams, heartbreakingly. I’m not the only one in the audience with moist eyes. Amin plays the despair convincingly, and it hits home.
Yet: how pure are they, those tears that we blink away here? To what extent coerces Fight you to relate not only to the character, but also to the systemic injustice? Stands Fight perhaps you unknowingly allow yourself to lean back? To wallow in pity for a tragic exceptional case? I believe it. Somewhere along the way, I believe, what made De Jongh’s text unsafe for me at first escaped me.
But that doesn’t change the fact that I hope you will see this performance. It is fictional stories like these that (whether they are completely successful or not) can help draw attention to blind spots in policy. So that catastrophes such as the Benefits Affair, which destroyed an unimaginable number of non-fictional lives, can be prevented in the future.