De Naklank van Stilte

Background

This was Marcus’s first solo theatre piece after he stopped working with the ArtEfficiency collective in 2002. The Vrijhof booking came in February 2003.

The original concept was a different show: a two-hander set in a destroyed concert hall, where a nurse runs an improvised wartime infirmary and a dying officer he takes in raves in delirium about his childhood, his rank, his children. Marcus was going to play both, the nurse live on stage and the officer on pre-recorded video opposite him. On 22 and 23 February the video was shot at home, with Joshua Quicken and Peter Ziekenheiner behind the camera; Marcus spent the day in bed with bandages around his head, “looking all weird and pasty,” and noted afterwards: “At some point it really started to look like a very badly produced, no-budget pornmovie. But i guess that porn would have better actors.”

Two weeks later the concept began to come apart. “I’m having second thoughts about the viability of the story,” he wrote on 25 February. By 4 March: “I’m seriously considering ditching the concept for the show and start like mad on a new concept… Just allow chaos to be confined within me, to perform the chaos and rant, let go and try my best.” On 10 March he made the call. The note in the blog four days later: “I ditched the whole goddamn concept a week before curtaincall, cuz i felt it was not a viable goal. That show was meant for three and a whole year’s development… Not just one guy in 5 weeks.”

The new show was written from scratch in three days. He was still working at half past two on Sunday night. On Monday morning, 17 March, he drove to Enschede with M. van Kampen as his sound man, set up the lighting and the staging with the venue’s crew, and got into costume just before going on. The performance ran from 12:30 to 13:30 and was livestreamed from the Vrijhof.

What he performed is the text in the PDF below: a two-hander between a Professor lecturing the audience on how to live with death as your guide, and a Madman in a bathrobe rummaging through papers and spewing his emotions against disturbing images. The text is divided between the two characters and played alternately, with fast wardrobe switches between segments. The performance language is Dutch, with English-language song and verse passages woven through, and the looming invasion of Iraq, deep in the post-9/11 moment, runs through the text: a Dutch marching song satirising the regelleger (a palindrome punning on “rule” and “to fix”) that “has raped the world,” and English chants borrowing the language of the Bush administration (“we will not stand for terrorism… we will stand for justice… we are the Bush, we are One, we are Legion”).

Of the performance itself Marcus wrote in his column afterwards: “Ik heb een uur op de planken gestaan en voelde me er ontzettend thuis. Ik heb geen moment last gehad van zenuwen… Ik ben blij dat ik de beslissing gemaakt heb te stoppen met ArtEfficiency en dit zelf te gaan doen.” Mid-performance, looking for ways to stretch the show to the full hour his contract called for, he glanced up at the clock: “Op een bepaald moment kwam ik weer op en zag ik die klok hangen… Tot mijn grote verbazing was er al drie kwartier verstreken. Ik geloofde mijn ogen niet.” The show eventually ran about 55 minutes for around 40 people in the room. An audience survey afterwards came back: 1 rated it very poor, 6 poor, 12 average, 9 good, 1 very good, for an average of 3.1 out of 5. Marcus’s own verdict: “Ik ben heel erg tevreden met het resultaat, ik had nooit gedacht dat het zo goed zou gaan.”

Two days later the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began.