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Stage Review: Interview

A stage adaptation of murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's Interview plays at Anken Green all this week.
Last updated: 2015-11-09


Interview had its opening night this past weekend and continues every night this week, bringing together two familiar faces of the English-language Shanghai stage for something refreshingly different, definitely pertinent and well-worth a watch. Its message (moral isn’t quite the word): never judge a book by its cover. To thicken the plot, some background…

For filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, Interview’s creator and the Dutch master’s great-grand-nephew, reputation didn’t just matter, it defined him. A polarizing antagonist through and through, he tragically underestimated his own potency as provocateur. In 2004, he was gunned down on a busy Amsterdam street in broad daylight by Mohammed Bouyeri, who claimed the murder was retribution for Van Gogh’s films “terrorizing Islam”. Van Gogh’s 2003 movie Interview, had nothing to do with religion, race or politics. Nonetheless, its stage adaptation is eerily evocative, a preemptive ghost of the director’s fateful miscalculation of not only his own influence, but also the more deadly one of his detractors.

Tin Foil Hat’s production of Interview is cleverly directed by Michael Beets and stars Carlijn van Ramshorst as paparazzi fodder and B-movie actress Katya, alongside JP Lopez as world-weary political journalist Pierre Peters. Central to the story is a very modern kind of celebrity, personified by both this fictional Katya and the renowned Dutch soap star Katja Schuurman, the original star of Van Gogh’s work of almost 10 years ago.



Irritated by his editor for sending him to interview a ditzy, gossip-mag floozy in lieu of reporting from Washington’s corridors of power, Peters returns the insult by turning up shamefully ill-prepared to his meeting with the actress. Prepared to be patronized about anything from her cup-size to her latest shags, feisty Katya is enraged by Peters’ unapologetic apathy. A chance mishap brings Peters to her apartment and a dangerous, psychological tango ensues. A war of words, dirty emotional play and charm offensives reveal the pair for the embittered monsters they’ve become, with just one victor emerging from their booze and drugs-fuelled spar.

A two-actor show is always going to be an intense experience, and that’s only amplified by the intimate venue for Tin Foil Hat’s production. It’s also a pretty tall order for even the most experienced of talents, and one that Van Ramshorst and Lopez mostly execute with aplomb. She’s the more believable of the two – although given her recent turn as Estelle in Satre’s No Exit, dangerously close to being typecast by Shanghai audiences as a highly strung diva. No matter, she pulls it off. Physical, beautiful and funny, she embodies the pampered but savvy starlet to perfection.

Likewise, Lopez manages the sullen, sulky journalist with ease. It takes them a while to realize their destructive chemistry, but come the second half, we’re gripped.



What’s really clever about this surprising Shanghai stage offering, though, is its multimedia backdrop, dreamt up by director Beets. A filmmaker by trade, he’s brought a little of the day job to his production: off-stage action and heart-wrenching exchanges are projected onto a giant back-set screen. It’s clever stuff, underlying the very nature of the celebrity at hand, as well as a nod to the work’s original format.

Together, cast and crew transport the audience to the bizarre, fast and dangerously deceptive world of celebrity and the media, and critique the assumptions we make about both, and the characters’ underlying wretchedness, mistrust and sham.

Beets has also created a whole lot of online content to draw audiences closer to Katya’s story – you can read that here. Of course, it’s far from a prerequisite, as is knowledge of its creator, Theo Van Gogh. Knowing what we know, though, assumptions, right or wrong, seem suddenly very, very dangerous…

***

Interview shows at Anken Green, 668 Huai An Lu, near Suzhou Nan Lu, tonight and every day up to and including Sunday. Curtain up 8pm. Tickets are 180rmb presale or 200rmb on the door. Email tix[at]tfhprojects.com or purchase at any Kaiba for presale prices.

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