Harry Meijer
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NOS News•yesterday, 19:19•Amended yesterday, 22:56
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Actor Cas Enklaar passed away on Wednesday at the age of 79 in his hometown of Amsterdam. In 1970 he was one of the founders of the legendary Werktheater (without h), together with Peter Faber, Shireen Strooker and Jan Joris Lamers, among others.
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The group made a name for itself in the 1970s with revolutionary performances about ordinary people, which were made without a director and played in, for example, hospitals, schools or care institutions, or in the tent in which they went on tour in the summer. They dealt with themes being terminally ill, growing old, loneliness or psychiatry. Afterwards, the actors often engaged in conversation with the audience.
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Enklaar also made a name for himself with a solo performance about the American actress Joan Crawford, An evening with Joan (1983). He was one of the supporting forces of the Werktheater for many years and remained associated with it until 1985.
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He then moved to Toneelgroep Baal and later to Toneelgroep Amsterdam, but he didn’t last long and became a freelancer. He has participated in the most diverse performances, both by small experimental groups and in free productions for the general public. He also made his appearance in TV series such as From sleep in plea and the satirical program Koefnoen.
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Furthermore, Cas Enklaar was a fixture in the films of director Theo van Gogh. He played the lead in A day at the beach (1984), after the book by Heere Heeresma, and participated in, among others, Loos (1989), Back to Oegstgeest (1987), after various novels by Jan Wolkers and False Light (1993). He also starred in the series Medea by Van Gogh and Theodor Holman, which only aired after Van Gogh’s murder, in January 2005.
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Other well-known films in which he has appeared are bag by Dick Maas, the Golden Calf awarded Long live the queen by Esmée Lammers (1996) and Masterclass (2005), the directorial debut of comedian Hans Teeuwen.
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Cas Enklaar’s last role was in 2019, in a classic of the absurdist theatre: Endgame by Samuel Beckett. That performance was to be repeated last spring, but Enklaar was suffering from esophageal cancer and he was already too ill to participate. He was replaced by Gerardjan Rijnders.
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