Life is Too Good to be True

For a critic who has written reviews of shows that do not exist, and who fills his blog with lies (nope, I never got arrested for attacking an old lady on the Royal Mile), I am inordinately interested in the idea of truth. I chase it, inspired by my Jesuit training, but find that it always races past my grasp, and life becomes a series of adventures that are tainted by the possibility that the truth of any story is only partial.

Luckily, theatre is there to present me with the possibility of a brief span of authenticity. And European theatre has, and this is true, been a constant source of inspiration for me. So, when Het Gelud turned up at the Fringe with an investigation into the role of truth, via the story of a journalist who just made a bunch of shit up, I was all over them for answers.

Truth, as a concept, seems to have a strange image these days. everyone wants it, but no-one is sure what it is. when you say "truth" - can you define what you mean by it?
 
Yes, you are right everyone seems to be puzzled by this. We don't use truth as a heavy philosophical concept in our performance. Our show is more a reflection of a few extreme perspectives on the matter taken out of everyday life: we are all constantly busy composing our linkedin, fb profiles and our resumes. We all want to present the best version of ourselves. The three characters in our show are very different contemporary examples on how to deal with being true today in our mediatised and noisy world where everyone needs to be a winner.
 
 Adding to that, what I love about Dutch performance is the way it breaks the conventions of how we understand theatre in the UK. Would you say the performance is experimental in form?  
In a way our show is super old fashioned in the sense that just one actor calls several worlds into being with hardly no means. And is experimental because the show isn't an A-Z story, but a construction of different text fragments. The source material for the text is derived from youtube speeches, Oprah Winfrey interviews and 60 Minutes specials. We developed a theatre text out of all kinds of things that are floating out there on the internet and in our mediatised lives.


Personally, I have always struggled with truth, and being a fan of both theatre and Plato, struggle to reconcile my faith in theatre as a place where truth can be explored. Given Plato's comments on actors (i think he would kick them out of the state for being liars), isn't it odd for a play to explore truth in itself?
 
Big philosophical question indeed. We don’t agree with good old Plato on this one. Difficult to give a short answer. Sort of torture to make us answer this. ;-)

That's a totally fair answer: since I think Plato is a big joker (he is constantly undermining his own statements), it's unreasonable of me to ask something like that.  

We believe it's a paradox of theatre in general because we think through fiction, reality is explored and exposed. We like theatre to be like Plato's garden though: a group of people that sits together to give some things a thought or two.




 
Underbelly Cowgate at 11.35am from 2-13 August as part of the Best of the Amsterdam Fringe season supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.