The Low Countries. Jaargang 1

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An Anatomy of Dutch Cabaret

Dutch cabaret is unique in the world. That at least is what Dutch people believe. In a country that has always been a melting pot of cultures and influences owing its existence to its neighbours, this cannot be true.

What is true is that Dutch people apparently have strong opinions about what cabaret is and can easily argue whether some theatre performance is really and truly cabaret. The English music hall is not, nor is the American musical or show, nor the French café chantant. Cabaret in the Dutch sense is in the first place play with language. The theatrical aspect comes second. The play with language should preferably have some impact, i.e. be part of a political, social or religious statement. We think that cabaret must be about something, and that something is usually ourselves, the microcosm we live in, our ethical and political views, our social opinions. Cabaret must be something personal, and that is why we think that the performing artist must be the creator of its text and songs.

The traditional picture is: only a few people on stage, one of them being the musician, usually the pianist. Their performance consists of an alternation of songs and sketches. The form of songs and sketches is satirical, the content social criticism, and the basis play with words, ambiguity, quotes, imitation.

It is obvious even to a Dutch mind that the definition or demarcation of the style is not clear-cut. The strong opinions however reflect the ongoing discussion about the definition of the form. This discussion in its turn shows the importance of cabaret for the Dutch mind. This importance is all the more confirmed by the fruitful osmosis between cabaret and other performing arts, between cabaret and other art-forms, and between cabaret on stage and cabaret-like performances in other media. The following overview proves this point.

Our starting point is the fifties. This decade was dominated by those the Dutch call the Three Greats: Wim Kan (1911-1983), Wim Sonneveld (1917-1974) and Toon Hermans (1916-).

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The roots of Wim Kan's career go back to the thirties. Kan's style was not innovative; theatrically he offered nothing new or special. Kan's fame is based on his ‘conferences’, long one-man conversations with the audience on the hot issues of the time. Play with language was a key element of these conferences.

However, the text was usually written for him, and music taken from wellknown tunes of the period. Kan contributed perfect timing, complete control, charm and wit. His trademark was his quasi neutrality. Kan discussed complete Dutch Cabinets on stage without showing any preferences. In later years politicians even felt flattered to be satirized by Kan's subtle irony.

Wim Sonneveld showed a completely different character. He was more the entertainer, someone who liked to dress up, a man who wanted to step outside his own personality and impersonate totally different characters.

Wim Kan (1911-1983) (Photo by Fotoburo Stokvis).

Toon Hermans (1916-) in 1980 (Photo by Gaby Hermans).

Sonneveld won fame through his characters: Nikkelen Nelis the street musician, Frater Venantius the singing friar and earlier, on radio, Willem Parel the organ grinder. Like Kan, Sonneveld was a performing artist who brought to life material written for him. Sonneveld was far less political than Kan, nastier, but also more exuberant and more joyful.

Toon Hermans is the clown of the three. His language is not particularly witty, nor does he show sharp political or social views. He is a man of the people in the sense that he loves mankind and he wants to demonstrate that. So his shows are a mixture of poetry-like reflections, nonsensical entertainment, and French-type songs. They are his own: he writes the texts and he creates the acts. Hermans is at his best in the long-drawn-out acts in which he combines all his talents in playing with the audience. Acts sometimes only exist on the basis of the public and its reactions. Only Freek de Jonge (1944-), a couple of decades later, has proved to be Hermans' equal in this respect.

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Sonneveld and Hermans tried their luck on television and that made them really famous. What was recorded and shown was just a plain recording of their one-man shows, but people stayed home to watch and their acts and songs became famous.

Kan hated television throughout his entire life. He stuck to radio and established the institution of the New Year's Eve conference, a one hour monologue in which he discussed the events of the year just past. For years no one dared to compete with Kan in his speciality. Only in the eighties did Freek de Jonge dare to present himself as Kan's successor.

It is the artistic mind that makes Annie M.G. Schmidt (1911-) the mother of Dutch cabaret. Her children's books, musicals, series for radio and television, and theatre plays always break taboos without being rude, unsubtle or would-be witty. The form of Schmidt's work is not particularly cabaretesque, but the content and the atmosphere are. Schmidt illustrates the osmosis mentioned above with her continuous shifts from cabaret-style work to other forms of art.

As in all other aspects of life, the sixties displayed an eruption of talent, an exploration of technique, a discovery of styles. The demand for art was so extensive that, whatever your talent, when you got onto the stage you achieved success. Thresholds were low and the willingness of the public was great.

The mass media such as radio and television showed their influence. As mentioned earlier, Hermans and Sonneveld explored television, but in a rather traditional way. Annie M.G. Schmidt wrote a special series for television: Ja zuster, nee zuster (Yes Nurse, No Nurse), which is one of the best things in her entire oeuvre. Kees van Kooten (1941-) and Wim de Bie (1939-) started on radio as De klisjeemannetjes (The Stereotype Blokes) and moved over to television in the late sixties and early seventies.

Television developed its own cabaret series; as, for instance, Monty Python's Flying Circus appeared on bbc Television. A good example in the early sixties was the notorious Zo is het toevallig ook nog eens een keer (Once Again, by Chance), based on the English television series That Was The Week That Was. The programme shocked the religious part of the Netherlands when it compared people's television cult with their religious behaviour. Religion was still a taboo, and television cabaret was prepared to break it.

Nevertheless, none of the television programmes mentioned was as innovative, original and fresh as Monty Python. They were basically television versions of cabaret on stage, as these programmes leaned heavily on the traditional cabaret form of alternating song and text. And their criticism was clear-cut and in most cases harmless. The young rebels were Neerlands Hoop (Dutch Hope), Herman van Veen (1945-) and Van Kooten and De Bie. Their influence dominates the second half of our overview and it is only now that new hopes are emerging. These new talents still have to fight the legacy of Neerlands Hoop, Van Veen and Van Kooten and De Bie.

Van Kooten and De Bie are probably the most faithful to traditional Dutch cabaret. They aim to criticize society and their main vehicle is language: they typify characters through language, they unmask through

Van Kooten (l.) and De Bie (r.) in 1976 (Photo by Roel Bazen).

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Freek de Jonge (1944-) (Photo by Jan Stegeman).

language and they attack the political use of language. Van Kooten and De Bie are very much cabaret artists; meanwhile they've been exploring the possibilities of cabaret on television for over twenty years.

Van Veen is the most poetic and musical of the three. He is not sharp or witty, but his music and songs are. And particularly in his songs and music he is unconventional and innovative. Van Veen didn't remain a cabaret artist. He developed his talent in all kinds of directions, from children's stories to television series.

Neerlands Hoop dominated cabaret in the seventies with a series of programmes of undisputed quality; no one could challenge them. Traditional song-sketch-piano cabaret had had it. Now that pop music had become such a dominant entertainment medium, you could not ignore the pop cult if you wanted to appeal to a young audience. Neerlands Hoop understood this perfectly and it is no coincidence that with Neerlands Hoop Express (1973), undoubtedly the most ‘rocking’ production up to that time, the success of the duo with young audiences increased enormously.

Apart from Neerlands Hoop, alternative forms of theatre were particularly popular. At the point where cabaret and drama meet, a new sort of theatre developed in which the illusion was broken and the ‘actors’ addressed the public directly. The American theatre clown Jango Edwards established himself in the Netherlands, and with his Festival of Fools made an enormous contribution to the development of a climate in which fringe theatre flourished. It wasn't the big renowned theatre companies with their own permanent theatres that set the tone, but the small, often new, theatres, most likely subsidized through universities, that attracted a new, young audience. Performances on the border of drama, music and cabaret dominated the picture of these small stages in the seventies.

The fringe theatre was a development that suited the uncommitted political and social climate which followed the pulsating period of the sixties. A development that cleared the way to the small stages beyond the worn and criticized tracks of the official circuit for a young, energetic generation of theatre people. When these theatre people were old enough to take over the torch from their abused predecessors, they themselves gained access to the big stages and the fringe theatre died a silent death. The end of the seventies marked the collapse of fringe theatre and new hope for cabaret in a more recognizable form.

Neerlands Hoop split up in 1979, when Herman Finkers (1954-), currently one of the most celebrated cabaret artists, won the personality prize and was voted ‘Most Popular Artist’ by the audience at an important national cabaret festival. Bram Vermeulen (1946-) became primarily a (pop) musician, while Freek de Jonge pursued a solo career as a shining example for tens of successors and epigones. De Jonge proved to be more and more a cabaret artist in the original sense of the word, although he draws his material not so much from actual excesses as from more general ethical problems. In the steps of Wim Kan he presented a number of New Year's Eve ‘conferences’ on television in the first half of the eighties, firmly cementing his already existing fame for the entire Dutch nation.

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Brigitte Kaandorp (1963-), Hans Liberg (1954-) and Paul de Leeuw (1962-) were all 1983 finalists in the above mentioned cabaret festival. Together with Herman Finkers and Youp van 't Hek (1954-), they stand in the forefront of the continuous stream of young cabaret artists who have successfully won their place on Dutch stages, very often with much pain and hardship. These young talents often had to go through a very hard time on the so-called youth and community centre circuit before they could expect any public recognition. Jammed between pinball machine and bar - which stayed open during the performance - they were easy targets for a handful of young people who turned their thumbs down anyway. Youp van 't Hek, who founded his cabaret Nar (Jester) as early as 1973 and only recently developed into probably the most important cabaret artist in the Netherlands, is typically somebody who won his place on the big stages only with great effort. In his shows, Van 't Hek still radiates the hard worker who wants to score with every sentence and who is the living witness of the message he puts across: don't avoid adventure, choose it and meet the challenge.

Thanks to dogged persistence many artists eventually did make it. The most important cabaret artists managed to gather a crowd of loyal followers, and some of them are worshipped by their own public, in much the same way as one person preferred Hermans and another Sonneveld in the sixties. At any rate, cabaret in the Netherlands is flourishing as never before. Now that video shops compete fiercely with cinemas and the big theatre companies aim more and more at a mature, educated theatre audience, there are plenty of opportunities for cabaret. After the meagre seventies, the entertainment magazines again contain cabaret sections, showing clearly that you can refresh yourself again and again every week with this form of theatre.

Nowadays cabaret is typified by an absence of political and social involvement based on personal experience. The message of the rising talent of the past decade, if there is one, seems to be just a thin layer of veneer. The unpretentious cabaret that aims only to entertain reigns unchallenged. This development may well have started with Herman Finkers and Brigitte Kaandorp, two popular cabaret artists who actually openly emphasize the complete absence of pretension in their programmes. One of the youngest cabaret artists, Marcel Boon, even admits straightforwardly: ‘My programme doesn't point the finger at anything as far as contents are concerned.’ When present-day cabaret touches upon ‘modern’ taboos such as aids, incest, maltreatment, ethnic problems, it usually doesn't spring from genuine involvement or indignation but far more often forms the easy basis for a non-committal joke. This lack of critical reflection, flirting with taboos as it were, is exactly what some people so strongly reject in the work of cabaret artists like Paul de Leeuw. Discussing socially loaded topics with the sole intention of making an impression can easily deteriorate into tastelessness.

The influence of the electronic media is unequalled in our time. The ‘Complete Works’ of Freek de Jonge for instance are available in unabridged form on video; moreover, radio and television play a very important role in the exploitation and distribution of the youngest talent. Leading cabaret artists such as Kees van Kooten and Wim de Bie, Paul Haenen, Jack Spijkerman and Paul de Leeuw have their own weekly

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Paul de Leeuw (1962-) (Photo by Clemens Rikken).

(satirical) radio and television shows. Recordings of successful cabaret performances are also regularly broadcast. Certain stations will often try to fill the gap created by the disappearance of the youth and community centre circuit, in cooperation with a number of theatre agencies. The last mentioned initiative is taken through the so-called cabarestafette, a formula that gives the younger and older winners of various festivals the opportunity to present themselves to a wider audience. A small number of them get the chance to perform for a national audience through television.

Cabaret also makes its influence felt through interaction with the printed media. Of course, there has always been a movement from literature to cabaret. From the sixties onwards, poets and song writers in the Netherlands have regularly left their desks to play on the stages of the small theatres. However, in the last few years an opposite movement can also be detected: from cabaret to literature. It concerns in particular established names. Following their activities as column writers in a number of national newspapers and weeklies, Kees van Kooten and Wim de Bie, for instance, are regularly at Number One in the Top Ten Lists of books with collections of stories ironically criticizing popular trends in Dutch society. Freek de Jonge too moves more often into the literary market; he has published the complete texts of his solo productions and, moreover, written a collection of memories of his youth and a novel. And a developing talent such as Youp van 't Hek is not only active as a sports columnist in a national newspaper, but achieves sales figures publishers just dream about with his collections of stories. Thus success on television and stage appears to have a positive influence on the literary activities of the great cabaret artists.

This development proves that Dutch cabaret still hasn't lost its unique position among other forms of art in the Netherlands.

jos nijhof and paul van der plank