fringe: niets is echt moeilijk

It's incredibly easy to see why Niets is echt moeilijk (or "Nothing is really difficult") by Dutch theatre group WAK is getting rave reviews.

Bart Strijbos, Dorus van der Meer and Toon Kuijpers don't just sit back and expect people to come and see them, each performance is proceeded by about 20 minutes of them working the crowd, handing out plywood "flyers" (I got the very first flyer, right before the hoards of children descended) and drawing people in.

While waiting for last night's show I saw maybe 20 or 30 people front up at the ticket office after being handed a plywood flyer or just watching them carry on. Which, for a 90 seat venue, is pretty impressive! Especially as it turned into a totally sold out performance.

The only downside was that once it was packed with all those people, and the lights, and three guys running around, the big wooden box was very, very hot last night and it wasn't just the performers who were getting all sweaty!

It's a little hard to describe the performance itself though... the show is called "Nothing is really difficult", but as Dorus (the blonde one) pointed out before the show, it means both that "nothing is really difficult" but also "the thing that is really difficult is nothing".

And this is a show kind of about nothing. There's no plot, no dialogue, no real set beyond the interior of the big wooded box... I think the best way to describe it is as "physical theatre". It's not really acrobatics, or mime, but there are elements of that.

Essentially it's just three guys inside a big wooden cube making an audience of 90 people laugh fairly constantly for 45 minutes.

Of the three though, I have to say that my favourite had to be Toon Kuijpers... he has the most expressive face and that slight nebbish quality which I found incredibly endearing.

So if you're in The Garden of Unearthly Delights, go and see Hilda in the little wooden box in front of the big wooden box and buy a ticket to see why nothing actually is really difficult, but amazing to watch.

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