…Breath-taking arrogance and arresting humility, monolithic certainties that stop dead at a surprising moment of fragility, callousness blossoming into soul-swelling generosity – all the teeth-clenching, enslaving contradictions of Ontroerend Goed, they’re all here… These blueprints have been reverse engineered. They are a retrospective. They are a greatest hits.
…‘All Work and No Plays’ is important reading for anyone interested in the potential of performance to escape traditional format and challenge audiences, or indeed the recent history of European devised theatre… In some sense, this mimics the experience of an Ontroerend Goed event: technically brilliant, disturbing and intelligent, shifting between ideas and emotions relentlessly. Alongside the hints for other makers to recreate these performances, this could be the most powerful part of the book. Combined with its idiosyncratic yet coherent design, it allows the texts to stand out against mere publication of scripts… through the complexity, it offers an insight into the most consistently challenging theatre-makers of the past decade.
