Theatre History Studies

This collection is a broad introduction to director Ivo van Hove that covers much of his career since the late 1990s. It is structured with an introduction and five sections that represent the breadth of van Hove’s work for the stage and how he has applied his methodologies to the different modalities: “Directing the Classics,” “The Festival Performances of Ivo van Hove and Toneelgroep Amsterdam,” “American Theatre,” “Opera across Europe,” and “Creation, Adaptation, Direction.” For those who have not seen van Hove’s work or have seen only one or two productions, the book provides an expansive overview of his work with lots of concrete, well-described examples. For those who have seen more of his work, there are still important insights to be gained from the dozens of productions described and analyzed across multiple genres. One thing that this book makes clear is that whatever one might ultimately think of van Hove’s output, it is prolific and influential and garners attention wherever it is performed.

The introduction is brief but allows the editors to reveal their methodology, which is to focus on the working processes of van Hove and his primary collaborator Jan Versweyveld. The emphasis on what van Hove and Versweyveld call “theatre-making” provides the book’s central argument: that van Hove is not “merely” a director or destroyer of texts but works with his collaborators to make theatre that is fully contemporary in its approach and context. Van Hove is often criticized for using texts carelessly or arbitrarily. However, the essays generally argue that despite his radical approaches he is quite serious about using the text as the basis of the performance. In fact, in Julie Sanders’s essay on his stage adaptation of the film Obsession (2017), she points out that van Hove uses the screenplay as the source text, not the film itself. Dozens of examples show that van Hove spends a great deal of time and effort on making his work from what he deems are the central concerns of the text, whether it is an older play, a film, a novel, or an opera.

Practitioners will be interested in the details of van Hove’s process, especially the years of preproduction discussion, the significant role of his collaborators, and the relatively brief time spent in rehearsals with actors on the fully completed set without scripts or much discussion—often only three weeks before audiences are there. Massai notes in her essay, “Canonical Iconoclasm,” that this is not unlike the Elizabethan practice. Ruth Wilson, who played Hedda [End Page 241] Gabler at the National Theater in London in 2016, and Halina Reijn, a Toneelgroep ensemble member who has starred in multiple van Hove productions, express in their interview a deep appreciation of van Hove’s trust in their instincts and the space he gives them to develop the psychological and emotional arcs of their characters throughout the process of rehearsals and performances. In rehearsal, van Hove focuses more on the physical and visual structure, giving actors specific physical directions but almost never psychological ones. Maja Zade, dramaturg at the Schaubühne, observes in her interview that van Hove is the only director she knows who has actors “continue pushing forwards” (63) from the last time they did the scene instead of starting over.

This space for continued exploration is also something van Hove tries to offer spectators. P. A. Kantze’s makes explicit connections between the spectators’ movement in pieces such as Roman Tragedies, Scenes from a Marriage, and Obsession and an “archaeological” impulse in van Hove’s work that asks that “the spectator be an explorer” (182) of the layers of meaning and history. His prolific output, evidenced in the number of productions discussed in the book, shows an explorer deeply engaged in the mysteries of the theatrical process and using art-making processes that depend upon tight structures of planning, conceptual work, and logistics...