Janneke has the Ax on stage Do you also do people? a piece of a train compartment has been furnished: one bench with a luggage rack and a film screen in place of the window. From there she tells about an incident during a train journey with unexpectedly nice people. It has made her “officially an optimist” in one fell swoop.
That is new for a comedian who showed herself to be a doom-monger and worrier in her previous two shows. She has not changed that radically, as the sequel shows. To begin with, she wonders why news never gets a follow-up: how are things going with the Hutus and Tutsis? And why doesn’t anyone wonder about her father, who has been underground for 25 years?
After which it continues about friends who get married and have children, work little and still have no time to meet up with her, the childless friend. It is a witty piece, with biting mockery.
In this way, De Bijl shoots from one thing to another, in a long string of subjects. She talks about her pets, her smartness, having or not having children, living in a village, a metal forum. She presents interesting characters: a meddlesome fellow villager, a depressed metal friend who she takes into her home. And she talks a lot about her father, and thus implicitly about her loss.
Her father was a stubborn man, and she misses that stubbornness. It leads her to an endearing ode to protest singer Armand, whose song she enthusiastically plays back. So enthusiastic that the audience in the Isala Theater in Capelle aan de IJssel actually gave it a round of applause.
Messy construction
De Bijl is unable to forge all these components into a whole. The structure is messy and many designs remain undeveloped. The train compartment, for example, hardly has a function.
In the stories about her father she seems to want to expose her sensitivity, but she remains too much on the surface for that. In the story about the depressed metal girlfriend, she chooses a different route and directly names the problems. But that is so that we can make harsh, cynical jokes.
In Do you also do people? De Bijl does not make clear choices. It’s a bit of everything and that comes at the expense of the joke density. But the main reason why the performance makes a lackluster impression is its storytelling style. Comedians thrive on the illusion that they make up their story on the spot, passionately, spontaneously. That is an acting art that De Bijl has not mastered sufficiently.
In the successful piece about the friends she speaks lively and naturally, but that is probably because she also has a chat with the audience in between. Then you hear her everyday voice. But in the rest of the performance she has a ‘performance voice’, and she sounds agitated and forced. The emphasis, the pauses: it’s just off.
That’s a shame. Because sometimes she writes material that would be comedy gold in the hands of comedians with the timing of Brigitte Kaandorp or Ronald Goedemondt. For her, such a joke produces no more than a snort of appreciation.
Also read
the debut novel by Janneke de Bijl, published this year
Reading list