The title I Like Art and Art Likes Me sounds almost like a love declaration to art. What does art mean to you personally? And how do you express this in the art form of theatre?

"The title is primarily a reference to Joseph Beuys’s work I Like America and America Likes Me. In that work, Joseph Beuys locks himself away with a coyote on American soil. The work symbolised a dialogue with the indigenous peoples and nature of America, and the traumatic colonisation of that land. In this performance, we have Beuys, with his great love for art and its freedom and accessibility, and Hitler, who, on the contrary, labelled free art as ‘degenerate’ and had it removed from Germany (only art that promoted the Nazi ideal was permitted to exist there). One could therefore view this fictional dialogue as a dialogue between the free - which seeks the origins of art - and the oppressive - which seeks to confine art to a reservation.

For me, art means being moved, playing, reflecting, feeling, thinking, imagining, collaborating, being, looking and listening together, and so on. It means creating worlds that do not yet exist, or taking a closer look at worlds that do exist. It is also a medium through which you can explore intense emotions or grand thought experiments. A place where this can lead to a collective and broader conversation. I can have an impassioned, furious or deeply moving conversation with one person, but what could be better than being able to have that conversation with lots of people at the same time? Together, we can expand and enrich our collective memory. Oh yes, and be courageous. Creating and embracing art means being brave.

In theatre, I express this differently every time. But there is always language. There is always thinking and feeling. There are always vibrant images. And there is always the desire to make an impact on the minds and hearts of the characters and the audience. I want people to leave the theatre with new thoughts, and for these new thoughts to lead to new insights and feelings."

Where and when did you come up with this meeting between Hitler and Beuys?

“On a walking holiday in Scotland in 2022 with Jip Vuik (one of the play’s writers, ed.). It suddenly occurred to me. I said to Jip: You know how people think Hitler was angry with Jewish people because he was supposedly turned down by a Jewish art school, don’t you? And you know that Joseph Beuys let everyone into the art school, even if they hadn’t been officially accepted, don’t you? Suppose Joseph Beuys had been born earlier and that Hitler had applied for admission and been accepted by Beuys… Maybe Hitler would have become an artist and the whole of the Second World War would never have happened. That would be quite a brilliant concept for a play.”

Can you take us through the creative process that followed?

"That idea from that walking holiday in 2022 has stuck with me. And if a concept sticks with me for two years, I know it’s deep enough and rich enough to work with. I didn’t want it to be a traditional theatre script, but an experiment, a clash of styles, something eclectic. And I wasn’t sure if that would be possible from a single mind. Then Jip and I came up with the idea of turning it into a writers’ room and writing the play with several writers. Thanks to Sarah (Moeremans), we got in touch with our friend Willem de Wolf, and that turned out to be a brilliant match. Together with Jip, Willem and Babette Kalker (dramaturg), we visited Museum Schloss Moyland several times: a museum full of Beuys’s work and a vast archive of books and visual material. We went on two writing residencies and stayed in a beautiful monastery. So then… we talked, thought, searched, and philosophised about the world, art, politics and morality. So many thoughts and conversations can spring from this concept.

Eventually, Willem and Jip started writing and it slowly began to take shape. I also met up with both actors (Julia Ghysels and Louis van der Waal) and took their thoughts and input back into the writing room. That’s always enriching. And we went to Friesland to visit a friend of Louis’s who knew Joseph Beuys very well. And, of course, we read lots of books and watched plenty of documentaries. Meanwhile, Daphne (de Winkel, costume design) and I had already been talking and brainstorming for a year. So the different disciplines inspired one another right from the early stages. The set inspired the text and the costumes; the actors inspired the text; and ultimately, the text in turn inspires the set. It was a marvellous interplay.

Working with Julia and Louis is also brilliant. Right from the start, it’s been such a marvellous, imaginative, curious and experimental process. And they are such rich personalities and performers. It often feels like playing outside. Lively, wild and endlessly marvellous and imaginative. The writing process was already so wonderfully inspiring, and that carried right through into the rehearsal process. Everyone I’ve worked with on this is simply incredibly talented and dedicated to what they do. That’s the greatest gift you can have in a creative process."