With their first German performance Der bus nach Dachau, De warm shop is dancing on a tightrope ★★★★☆

If you use Snapchat’s happy cartoon filter on images of inmates at Dachau concentration camp, you get the Disney version of a holocaust movie. Is that inappropriate? Or is it necessary to ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten by future generations? The Dutch theater makers of De warm shop, in their own unruly way, ask these kinds of questions in their very first German performance: Der Bus to Dachau.

The premiere was in Schauspielhaus Bochum (where the Dutchman Johan Simons is in charge). Ward Weemhoff and Vincent Rietveld of De warm shop made the performance there with German and Dutch actors. The starting point is a film script from the 1990s by Van Weemhoff’s father, about a fake visit by a number of Dutch former prisoners to camp Dachau. That movie was never made. But now the son uses this script in a theatrical performance about a film crew trying to make the ultimate holocaust movie. This team is led by director Rutger Weemhoff (here played by Vincent Rietveld).

Filming is done live on stage. A large wooden box is arranged as a barrack of the camp. With and without filters, the hardships are portrayed. But the film crew soon finds itself in a crisis. How do you imagine the Holocaust? What else is there to add to the nine-hour documentary shoah by Claude Lanzmann? Is it desirable to romanticize, as Steven Spielberg did with Schindler’s List? In addition, the German actors wonder why a bunch of ill-informed Dutchmen come to Germany to criticize their supposedly cramped handling of the war.

As usual, this Warm store presentation also has several layers. We see bits of the story about the ex-prisoner, we see a film director totally overplaying his hand and we see, in a layer above, Ward Weemhoff as himself intervening in and commenting on the theatrical performance. The performance eventually destroys itself, by dismissing the original idea of ​​the film as ludicrous. This is also vintage The warm store.

Net as a spectator, you are left with a wry mixture of funny moments (Weemhoff’s coal German, the Snapchat filters and mutinous actors) and the visible aversion of all the characters to have to relate to a subject as black as the Holocaust. This discomfort may be even more pronounced for a German spectator. The theater makers are dancing on a tightrope with this, but they manage to let this inconvenience exist without falling into total distaste. No one is chased away and with that they make room for the key question: how guilty should we feel?