Noord Nederlands Toneel

We all know this type of man from House of Cards, Game of Thrones as well as from Shakespeare’s collective works: the over-ambitious alpha male who will stop at nothing to get his way, archetypical personified by Shakespeare’s Macbeth. However, due to the overwhelming horror cocktail of lust for power, war and excessive ambition in Shakespeare’s original play, one of its other important features seems to get overlooked: that of nature opposing the continuous violence caused by mankind. Images of horses, ravens, dark forests and witches keep recurring, yet only as extras. In their adaption of the play, however, German directors Jan-Christophe Gockel and Jana Vetten choose to remove all masculine story lines and give nature and animals the leading role, thus posing the question: what is left of the play now?

Under the direction of Guy Weizman, Noord Nederlands Toneel is building a new, interdisciplinary theatre house. Directors and makers who work in the Machinefabriek at Bloemstraat 38 all do so based on the conviction that the complexity of the world for 21st-century people can no longer be described in a single language or art discipline. There is too much going on for that.

Whether it concerns identity, artistic disciplines, taste, boundaries, hierarchical relationships, or the relationship between politics and citizens: no framework is more rock solid. Noord Nederlands Toneel often uses more than one discipline to depict this modern world and to capture it in theatre; dance, theatre, music, movement, visual arts, fashion, video, poetry are the many layers that stories from the world around us also have. nnt.nl