Jasper van der Veen is a pleaser who wants to be a rebel. We witness that struggle in his first full evening program It threatens to be completely fine.
The Groningen Van der Veen, the convincing winner of the Leids Cabaret Festival in 2019, presents himself as a gentle Waldorf child, a disarming doubter with a pleasing mother and an emotionally absent father. The type who, despite his enormous medical fear, still considers watching his own knee surgery, simply because he can’t say no to the over-enthusiastic surgeon.
That pleasing behavior becomes a problem when friends suddenly “swim into the trap” of lives with homes and children. The first sign of this comes from a couple of friends, who extensively explain their future plans during a wobbly boat trip on Lake Michigan – it is a continuous scene that Van der Veen returns about four or five times in his performance, and that each time is announced by his heaving arms.
Van der Veen’s panic mounts when his girlfriend also says “she would like someone to join us” – a wish that turns out not to be about group sex. Suddenly he feels resistance: in two-year-olds, after all, Van der Veen does not see the angelic toddlers that his friends describe, but only angry, root-stained monstrosities.
Van der Veen knows how to depict such a monstrosity magnificently. In any case, Van der Veen shows himself to be a mature stage personality: he is disarming and charismatic and knows how to keep his high energy. With his razor-sharp facial expressions and playing, he effortlessly moves into new worlds: for example, we are in an ambulance where he experiences a ketamine trip and thinks he is a sultan, and another time we imagine ourselves in that boat on Lake Michigan, where Van der Veen imitates the splash of water with his fingers in a drinking cup. The theatrical finds are fascinating, original and often screechingly funny. Van der Veen’s improvisations also prove to be rock solid during public interactions.
Thematically, it still rattles a bit. For example, ‘pleaser’ Van der Veen says that he sees enforcers as substitute teachers, who should be harassed ‘until they go home crying’. He also claims not to accept bicycle fines: he says ‘no’ to an officer until the officer drops off despondent. They are not the only examples that have little to do with pleasing behaviour. They show that Van der Veen has long developed his rebellious side. The question is whether he himself is aware of this.
Under the guise of rebellion, Van der Veen ultimately does not abandon his strong storyline about Lake Michigan. That’s a shame.
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