In fact, this is the same journey I embarked upon with my first performance, Til Death…, about saying goodbye to my husband and having to carry on alone. These very lines appear in it, following the news that my husband was terminally ill: 

It was the start of a difficult journey which, to this day, has brought more setbacks than good news. (…). All the plans and dreams we’d had vanished like snow in the sun. Just like all the certainty we’d assumed was there.

Being thrown back on your own resources. Who hasn’t been there? And how do you react? These are questions I constantly ask myself to learn more about life. Because I’ve been confronted with them quite a lot in recent years. But it wouldn’t surprise me if almost everyone carries these kinds of questions around with them, sometimes linked to a fear of the unknown, or rather, the things we have no control over. Sometimes, too, out of the very same fascination that I feel for them. For me, theatre is the medium through which to get closer to possible answers and to take an audience along on the journey to find them.

Isn’t that therapy, then? I’m asked that question regularly, and it’s not one I can answer with a categorical ‘no’. Of course, I use the process of creating theatre around life-changing events to come to terms with them. That helps with the healing process, although my husband’s death was, of course, far more life-changing than spending four days in a war zone. Nevertheless, theatre mustn’t become a public therapy session. That’s not interesting. In fact, it would become maudlin and pitiful. That’s why I’m always striving to convey a universal feeling – something everyone can relate to. You’re not just telling a story; you’re also channelling meaning by stepping onto the stage and sharing everything you have at your disposal at that moment: voice, movement, intonation and, where appropriate, set, lighting and sound. After all, you’re creating theatre.

The smaller and more personal the story, the greater its universal significance. That sounds contradictory, but over the years – as a performer, but also as a director of other people’s personal stories – I’ve learnt that any deliberate attempt to make a story universal has the opposite effect. The story then quickly loses its depth and power, and with it, its value. This is easily explained by my ‘three layers of a good story’ theory. The universal layer is given preference over the essential emotional layer within which empathetic exchange takes place. Unfortunately, this is not always recognised, as we were once rejected by an Amsterdam based arts fund because a story was deemed too personal.

We went ahead and produced that show anyway, and it touched many people deep in their hearts.

Theatre is allowed to move people. At least, the sort of theatre I want to create. And preferably not just on a cognitive level – so that you can have a good chat about it in a post-performance discussion – but above all on an associative and emotional level. By embarking, together with the audience, on a quest to explore what it means to be human and to act in circumstances of uncertainty. Always based on stories that are both real and, at the same time, dramatised.

That is why I create theatre.