Latter can not be said about “Perfect Wedding” by Charles Mee (you can find the text here), a play about two people about to get married and their families where no relationship has worked out (both mum and dad of the bride have new loves). Hove has made the situation even more bizarre by changing the sexes of most of the lovers: bride is a man but wears a wedding-gown, dad has a new boyfriend (as was in Mee´s version), sister of a bride wears a suit and has a suited lover named James played by a woman and so on. Considering that this is performed in the Netherlands, supposedly the most tolerant country in the world, Hove really has nailed it and gets a lot of laughs from his audience who this time is sitted around the beige carpet. However this is not a hard social criticism, self irony perhaps, and as the story flows with the same fluency as with “Opening Night” the audience gets pulled in the atmosphere created by actors and constantly playing music (all the doors are open and there is always some music playing in the corridors, commenting on the action on stage) and again, two hours later, you feel you have enjoyed yourself but still think that you needed something more. This, however, is a question of taste and should thus be disregarded here cause there are not so many directors who can catch the attention of an ordinary theater-goer without seriously compromising his artistic purposes. Mainstream theater at its best.
There is one thing that can be said with certainty about the director Ivo van Hove after seeing those two productions: he likes to rearrange audience, literally. In Stadsshouwburg Amsterdam, the home of the Toneelgroep Amsterdam Hove leads, the chairs in the big hall are never put quite the same. With “Opening Night” by John Cassavetes part of the audience is sitted on the big stage, they are the people who have come to see the rehearsals of “De Tweede Vrouw” (“The Second Wife”) which has to open in few days despite of the fact that leading actress (played brilliantly with arrogant sadness by Elsie de Brauw) has lot of questions about her character and mainly about her own life. Play itself goes on fluently, there are many cameras and screens doubling fragments of the action on stage and the main interest of the production lays in acting of the troupe (it is a co-production with NTGent from Belgium). Directing is crafted and no text flows on stage without a solid reason, so I let the tempos of the performance carry me on with ease but at the same time with no special excitement. It just is one of those production where everything is there and you can not really make any critical remark (perhaps only state that cameras on stage are getting a bit old already) and still it does not touch you the way art should. It could be that a woman in her mid-life-crisis is not quite my cup of tea but mainly it is because the production by Hove did not add anything to the way this topic is usually dealt and I could not really see why the play is relevant here and now.
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