TONEELGROEP AMSTERDAM
ARTS HOLLAND MAGAZINE
Van Hove continues to make large-scale theatre with the attitude of small-scale theatre, expressed through a search for intimacy and immediacy, shunning the overwhelming monumentality that so often characterizes the big stages in Europe. He uses abstract, purely conceptual set designs (designed by Jan Versweyveld, his partner in both life and work), and an acting style that focuses on candour and interaction.
if they are in the theatre where the story takes place, and watches the action as a studio performance), film (the performance is recorded by cameras on stage and projected onto a large screen, allowing filmic close-ups and an entirely different perspective on the events in the story) and the large auditorium stage. Backed by a soundtrack of Neil Young songs and carried by the astonishing emotional range of lead actress Elsie de Brauw, a rare performance ensued, both highly theatrical and intimate, and as naturalistic as it was conceptual.
His idiosyncratic approach is perhaps best reflected in Opening Night, from 2007. Based on the 1977 film by John Cassavetes, the play centres on an actress who suffers a panic attack right before the premiere of a show, when a young fan who wants to speak to her is killed in an accident. The brilliant scenography is a combination of a small auditorium setting (part of the audience sits on a smaller stand on the stage, as
The idea of using a theatre as a location for site-specific theatre, as in Opening Night, reached its peak with the completion of Roman Tragedies (2007). In an uninterrupted six-hour p 24