I prefer to write about an ideal Zomergasten evening, one that always seems to be in the barrel again. The evenings with Garry van Pinxteren, Sana Valiulina and Liesbeth Zegveld were highlights and the one with Sakir Khader I found remarkable enough to keep watching.
With this last summer guest, Pierre Bokma, I didn’t really ‘get into it’, which partly had to do with his interviewer Hanneke Groenteman. I know her as a sharp, involved and witty conversationalist, but she now seemed to be in an admiring position that got in the way of any further questioning or commentary. The ‘small’ look at himself, which we were promised at the beginning of the evening, therefore remained vague and fragmented. Judging by Groenteman’s look, she often didn’t understand what he was saying, but she let it go anyway. Bokma was and remained in the role of ‘the top actor’, untouchable, the way in which he slowly got drunk increased his pathos. I had hoped that Groenteman would have been able to see through that a bit more, if only by laughing at him in a positive way every now and then, something she can usually do better than anyone else without becoming annoying.
Instead, everything became a bit sacred this evening, from Bokma’s own acting, very ‘painful’, to the ‘monkey watching’ with the bonobos, more intelligent than we think but – a small prick from Groenteman – solving everything with sex, and the mutually glorified sighing during an interview with Prince Claus.
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The explanation for his choice film, We Need to Talk About KevinLynne Ramsay’s masterpiece based on Lionel Shriver’s novel, remained a mystery, especially since he said several times that this was his third choice. What were the other two films he would have preferred to show? Yes, this was his childhood, he was also a “pretty dangerously unruly child” who knew no greater triumph than being able to hurt his mother and foster mother.
Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the human condition had opened his eyes to the complexity of the brain, and the nature of instinct versus consciousness. Instincts need not be enemies, a discovery that helped him reflect on his own frustration and anger. Perhaps it’s a good sign that I would have liked to hear more about that, about how he now, as an adult, navigated his life with his children from different women, while at the same time wondering why I would have wanted to hear more about that. As if there might have been some truth in that, also about the profession of acting, that was not now revealed.
“Have you ever felt really lost?” asked Groenteman.
‘Oh yes, of course,’ Bokma said. ‘Without a family to come from, you become a wanderer.’
High time to ‘come to ourselves for a moment’ and watch Luka Modric, the Croatian footballer of whose ‘brilliant’ and ‘hyperintelligence’ they apparently no longer had to convince each other. That’s actually how it went this evening. There were enough painful things in the air – the culture of fear at ITA, the disputed leadership of Ivo van Hove – and interesting issues – smearing versus acting, what makes a director ‘pleasant’, gloom and depression – but the conversation always seemed to be prematurely smothered in superlatives back and forth, or ‘hey’, something different for a moment.
What Bokma said about his military service was striking. That he was taught so many things in a short time, about people, equipment, exercises… He learned what discipline was and the importance of consultation. And, when asked if he was satisfied with his life, he said that the only thing he didn’t want was to be portrayed as an ‘old white man’. An understandable fear, by only dampening it with ‘quality’, ‘what you do’, and suddenly he became smaller, and I saw us sitting there, the viewer and the viewed.
As if it was meant to be, it then went through a fragment from Ratatouille about the role of the reviewer, that cowardly louse at home on the couch (my words). A fiery Bokma: ‘The stupidest piece is always better than what the reviewer writes about it.’ I can agree with that to a certain extent, although criticism is also necessary to make quality shine. For example, that of De Warme Winkel and Orkater, threatened in their existence, and rightly held up by Bokma as indispensable platforms for new theatre.
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From July 21 to August 25, VPRO Summer guests every Sunday evening on NPO 2.
