Oss has a new theater since today. On paper that is, because it is still in The Hague. The Zuiderstrandtheater in the dunes of Scheveningen will be demolished and rebuilt in Oss, as a partial replacement for theater De Lievekamp. Thursday was the official handover of the theater.
It is two aldermen of GroenLinks who will officially carry out the transfer of the theater on Thursday afternoon. Osse alderman Dolf Warris was impressed: “You drive here this afternoon with the feeling that we are going to do that for a while, but when you stand here you feel that it is something very special. To my knowledge, a theater has never been built in a circular manner like we are going to do.”
It will be an enormous puzzle to dismantle the theater in such a way that it can be removed from the truck 125 kilometers away and rebuilt. For this, project developer and demolition must work well together.
At the moment, the theater on the beach of The Hague is no longer in use. In the foyer downstairs there are already boxes with chairs and crates with sinks ready to be moved. All parts are numbered and stored. In demolition circles they also call this the Legoization of the building, so that it can be rebuilt later as a Lego construction set.
Coen Bais is the director of De Lievekamp in Oss. He walks around his future theater with a big smile on the afternoon of the handover. “I feel euphoric. But you really have to want this, it is really complex. We’re not there yet, but when you see this enthusiasm, which unleashes it all…”
It is not immediately the case that it is cheaper to use a second-hand theater instead of building it from scratch. “It’s just not more expensive,” says Bais, who also wants to secure the necessary subsidies from Europe for this particularly sustainable project. Bais: “The point is that the theater becomes bigger than De Lievekamp, so that we can bring more interesting artists to Oss than we do now.”
Coen Bais expects that the first performance in the new theater can be visited at the end of 2025.
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