Only connect: Eric de Vroedt's The Seasons
On a seven-hour staging of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet in Amsterdam.
Apologies for this newsletter arriving a day late in your inboxes, but it’s been an intense and distressing few days in Serbia. On Saturday one of the larger protests the city has seen took place – with an estimated 140,000 people on the streets - and while the protest itself was peaceful, afterwards as people started to disperse there were several violent clashes between protestors and riot police. Things weren’t helped by Serbia’s president giving a smug ‘victory’ speech engineered to inflame tensions, equating protestors with terrorists. In the space of a few days, things have become increasingly repressive and volatile.
Serbian citizens have been setting up blockades around Belgrade and other cities across Serbia, blocking streets with trash cans, furniture, and whatever else is to hand. In one neighbourhood people have been defying police by continuously walking over a pedestrian crossing. These are different from the previous student-led protests, more impromptu, fuelled by frustration and anger. The police have responded by arresting students, arresting high schoolers, arresting professors. They have not shied away from using violence. People have been beaten, in some cases severely injured. The international media have been dismayingly slow to cover this. Here’s one piece in Al Jazeera that gives a flavour of what’s going on but it’s already out of date. This is, as they say, a dynamic situation. There were more arrests and violence last night.
Oh, and because they are clearly not content with devastating the cultural sector, the government also recently appointed the rabidly nationalist former leader of a notorious paramilitary unit in the 1990s as president of the National Theatre’s board of directors.
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The day after the UK voted to leave the EU in June 2016, I flew to Poland. I was visiting Poznan for the Malta Festival and for the duration of my visit people kept asking me “what the hell is going on in your country?” or questions to that effect and I had no answer for them. I was still reeling from the result and the way the campaign had been framed, not around the economic benefits or otherwise of remaining in the EU – in fact many of the regions that voted for Brexit were those that received significant EU funding – but around explicit xenophobia, fear of the other.
Autumn, the first book in what would become Ali Smith’s ‘seasonal quartet,’ was published in October 2016. “I can’t remember reading a novel that felt so firmly footed in the present,” the Guardian wrote at the time. It felt immediate, pinpointing that sense of living in a riven Britain, not just Brexit and its fallout, but what was then termed the “migrant crisis”, the increasing hostility to people fleeing warzones, the hateful rhetoric. This was all interwoven into a collage-like text along with references to Shakespeare, Dickens, art and artists, time and its slipperiness.
Now director Eric de Vroedt has adapted all four books for Het Nationale Theater - the theatre in which Eline Arbo’s production of The Years, another ambitious literary adaptation, originated - turning them into a seven-hour performance consisting of four parts with an hour-long dinner break after the first two sections. I attended the premiere, with Smith in attendance, at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam as part of the Holland Festival. (It’s probably helpful to say up front that while I have read Autumn and Winter, I have not read Spring and Summer).
De Vroedt's adaptation is, on the one hand, impressively fluid. It distils these four novels with their large cast of characters, many of whom are connected in ways not apparent at the start, into something elegant and coherent. While each part has its own visual identity all are part of a cohesive whole. Yet, while it hits the requisite story beats, the kaleidoscopic fusion of the poetic and political that characterise Smith’s texts remains elusive. In trying to capture the ‘everything-ness’ of the novels, something of their specificity and richness (and underlying anger) is lost.
In Autumn, the 104-year-old Daniel Gluck (Hein van der Heijden) is lying in a hospital bed. He’s still alive but is in the process of exiting this world. Much of this section takes place in the terrain of memory and dreams as Daniel imagines himself naked on a shore, a scene of strange, wild beauty suddenly punctured by the horror as he glimpses washed up bodies on the beach (Autumn was published the year after the terrible image of Syrian two-year-old Alan Kurdi dead in the sand). The first part charts in flashback Gluck’s friendship with his young neighbour Elisabeth Demand (June Yanez). We are first introduced to her as she is attempting to apply for a new passport and being confronted with rigid British bureaucracy plus a whiff of xenophobia, eventually dismissed for having the wrong-sized head.
Elisabeth is a child when she first meets Daniel. Her mother finds it suspicious that this already quite old man would want to spend time with a young girl, but Elisabeth and Daniel become close, and he helps fuel her interest in art. Elisabeth develops a fascination with 1960s pop artist Pauline Boty, one of those figures destined to be rediscovered, forgotten and rediscovered again. Her PhD supervisor tries to put her off this line of research since there’s not enough material out there, but this just prompts Elisabeth to ditch him.
Van der Heijden alternates between interacting with Yanez and lying on a gurney at the rear of the stage, a close-up of his face projected on a screen. The set, designed by Julian Maiwald and Léa Thomas, consists of a wooden frame that descends from above creating a wall across the stage, which is thematically fitting. Inside that there’s also a fabric cylinder which also rises and falls at intervals, a softer more organic shape. At one point metal fences are erected, a symbol of what the country was becoming. There’s also a video screen which allows for the creation of more cinematic scenes (which will get a real workout in the fourth section).
Each section has its own style of costume care of designer Lotte Goos. In Autumn everyone sports colourful belts while Daniel is wearing poppy green socks. Winter is steely and grey, while Spring kits people out in institutional blue. Summer has everyone decked out in stripes.
On one side of the stage, a performer scissors through magazines creating collage-like artworks reminiscent of Boty. There’s also a black -and-white, Factory-like sequence of Boty in the 1960s. The work of female artists is a recurring theme in Smith’s quartet, particularly the Italian filmmaker Lorenza Mazetti and the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. A Hepworth sculpture, Mother and Child, a concave polished stone with a smaller stone that fits neatly inside it, is one of several recurring motifs in the piece.
While Autumn has the texture of memory, slip-sliding in time, Winter is more linear, the bulk of the section consisting of an extended dinner scene which pits the cantankerous, capitalistic Sophia (Antoinette Jelgersma), wreathed in her fur coat, against her sister, Greenham Common veteran, Iris (Esther Scheldwacht), two women who haven’t spoken in years. Iris has been invited to dinner by Sophia’s nature blogger son Art (Joris Smit), who has returned to the family house for Christmas together with a young woman, Lux, who he met at a bus-stop and paid £1000 to be pretend to be his girlfriend Charlotte with whom he’s just had a massive row in which she took a drill to her laptop.
Dickens lingers over this section too, as Sophia is haunted by the disembodied child’s head that follows her around (De Vroedt largely skirts over this part of the story). Over a Christmas dinner pieced together from disparate things in Sophia’s fridge, the two women slowly reconcile their differences, with Lux/Charlotte acting as a catalyst. Central to this section is the Greenham Common peace-camp, a legendary 1980s women-led protest movement, in which a camp was set up outside the RAF base in Berkshire that was housing US cruise missiles. Photos of the Greenham women are projected on the stage and the spirit of these women is evoked.
The music throughout is performed live by musicians Florentijn Boddendijk and Remco de Jong, one of them using a kind of super-cool square-framed theremin thingy. In Winter this is supplemented with various Christmas songs, including Carol of the Bells. The true musical highpoint of this scene comes at the end as the sisters sing the anthemic Carry Greenham Home, and a choir of unseen women’s voices join with them. (This was pre-recorded and includes members of the Nationale Theater’s staff). It’s a properly spine-tingling, uplifting moment, all these voices uniting in a song of resistance and solidarity. It’s such a stirring scene and one the production unfortunately never quite replicates in the sections that followed.
Spring strikes a different tonal note. Richard Lease, an aging television director who back in the day helmed episodes of seminal BBC series Play for Today, is grieving his friend Paddy. When his attempts to kill himself are scuppered by the unreliability of the Scottish rail network goes on an impromptu road trip, a pilgrimage of sorts, with a woman called Brittany, an employee of security firm SA4A who works at an Immigrant Removal Centre, and an otherworldly, Greta Thunberg-coded 12-year-old called Florence. (“Does that make me the machine?” quips Brit). This section is more propulsive than the ones that came before, with De Vroedt leaning into road movie tropes. The characters cram together in the cab of a coffee van that doesn’t serve coffee, singing snippets of songs from the radio. The actors convey their journey in the customary way of having the actors jiggling in sync to convey motion.
Spring, even more than the earlier books, focuses on the grim reception awaiting migrants in the UK, crammed into ‘detention centres’ that are prisons in all but name, dehumanised and demonised for having the temerity to come to the country in the first place. While this context is very much still present, a constant undernote, in this section of the performance, here more so than in the other sections, it feels like De Vroedt is honouring the plot of the novel at the expense of the more tapestry-like qualities of Smith’s writing.
Summer has arguably the hardest task in that it needs to knit together the three previous sections while also introducing new characters, including Nur Dabagh as teenage Robert, an Einstein-obsessed, proto-anti-woke keyboard warrior who enjoys using racist language to get a rise out of his elders. If the Prime Minister can describe people as having “watermelon smiles”, why can’t he? The little shit superglues an hour-glass into his sister’s hand, which he later justifies by saying he was giving her the ‘gift of time,’ but it is still a dick move.
Each section begins with a kind of prose poem – in Winter it’s a list of everything that’s dead: “God was dead, to begin with” but also romance, chivalry, poetry and the internet. Revolution, though, that’s not dead, not yet. In Summer this is less effective, more of am awkward rap.
Summer was published in 2020, just as the world encountered a “clever virus.” (It’s worth stressing again how nimble and responsive these books were). While a large chunk of Summer consists of Daniel recalling the time he spent incarcerated as a young man with his father and other Germans on the Isle of Man during the war, the parallels between Daniel’s wartime experience and the welcome afforded to migrants today is clear. As Gluck says, when someone points out that his experience didn’t seem all that bad considering, “a prison is still a prison.” The internment camp scenes are filmed in black-and-white, a homage to Italian filmmaker Lorenza Mazzetti, one of the artists who figures prominently in the novel. Side characters are presented in a Laurel and Hardy-esque fashion. While I enjoyed the way Boty’s work was woven into Autumn, the decision to present the flashbacks in this way really didn’t work for me. It feels like something closer to a pastiche, and while the constant shifting in and out of this cinematic mode was impressive on a technical perspective, it really pulled me out of the show, diluting the emotional – and political - power of these scenes.
As with all the previous chapters, Summer contains flashes of poetic beauty – lines lifted straight from the page – as well as something of Smith’s playfulness and sense of humour. But for me it was also the most frustrating section. Adaptation is an imperfect art. As he explains in this interview, a lot of people told De Vroedt that these books would be impossible to stage and I kind of like the fact that made him even more eager to do it. At the same time I’m not convinced he’s pulled it off. Smith’s novels contain so much – art, nature, political immediacy, profound humanity, a sense of interconnectedness – and while the production captures elements of this, it all feels a little too restrained for my tastes, a little too neat and hygienic.
Going in I was intrigued by the idea of watching a reflection on the act of national self-harm that was Brexit from a European perspective, a state-of-our-nation play made by someone on the outside, but I don’t really feel that’s what I got (which is fair enough given this was not made with a British audience in mind - the Dutch critics have all been largely favourable). While De Vroedt retains the references to Chicken Cottage and Play for Today, the piece felt unanchored, the play inhabiting one of those sterile theatrical any-spaces. The seven hours slid by pleasantly enough. It was very easily digestible as a spectacle. There was a baseline of skill and craft that meant I was always reasonably engaged and there were some very charming moments, but other than the gorgeous Greenham Common sequence, I remained largely unstirred. Despite the ambition of the undertaking, it also never felt all that theatrically daring and it’s perhaps telling that one of the first things I did after emerging into the Amsterdam evening was to download Spring and Summer, like someone still hungry.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
Manchester International Festival –Highlights of the 2025 edition of the biannual festival, the first under creative director Low Kee Hong and also the first to be hosted within Aviva Studios, home of Factory International, include A Single Man, a new contemporary ballet by Jonathan Watkins, based on the novel by Christoher Isherwood and Liberation, a new play by writer Ntombizodwa Nyoni and director Monique Touko about the Fifth Pan-African Congress. The festival runs from 3-20 July.
Festival d’Avignon - Since Tiago Rodrigues took over as artistic director in 2022, the Avignon festival has featured a different “guest language” every year and, this year, the focus is on Arabic. Highlights of the 2025 festival programme include Rodrigues’ own show, La Distance and MAMI, the new show by young Greek director Mario Banushi. The festival runs from the 5-26 July.
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I couldn't get past the intro as I was so stunned! Its all sounding way too familiar. The former head of a paramilitary group is now the head of a Theatre Organization??!! Please stay as safe as you can Natasha. Thank you for keeping us in the know and alert to all this shit.