Pim and Theo are not your everyday children’s theatre protagonists. Pim is Pim Fortuyn, the far-right Dutch politician assassinated in 2002 after claiming that “the Netherlands is full”. Theo is the provocative Dutch artist and film-maker Theo van Gogh, who was murdered in Amsterdam two years later over a short film that featured naked women painted with passages from the Koran. Rosie and Jim, they are not.
Putting the pair onstage is a big risk – particularly in front of a teenage audience. Alex Byrne, artistic director of the anglo-European devised theatre company New International Encounter, is keenly aware of that. “The more I explored the subject,” he says, “the less I knew what I thought about it.” That’s exactly what drives his work: “If I already know, then what’s the point in doing it? You go on stage to find out with an audience what something might mean.”
Fortuyn and van Gogh were both vehemently outspoken public figures – as controversial as they were contradictory. “It’s very easy to sympathise with Theo van Gogh,” says Byrne. “He’s an artist. He stood up for freedom of expression and the right to offend people. He offended a lot of people, did some very foolish things and was murdered in public, in a very brutal way.
“On the other hand, Pim Fortuyn was, in many ways, a very unappealing man: potentially racist with a particular anti-immigration agenda, but he was also very erudite and charming with this strange dichotomy of being both very rightwing and also very openly gay and promiscuous.”
In NIE’s piece, the two men are almost bound together in death, like two Beckett characters forced to rely on and infuriate each other for all eternity. “Pim Fortuyn, who was shot in the head, can’t remember what happened to him,” Byrne explains. “Theo van Gogh, who had a discourse with his killer before an explanation was pinned to his chest with a steak knife, can’t forget.” Both walk around with their fatal injuries on show: an indignity that makes them simultaneously clownish and unsettling.
The dilemma the two men stand for is this: Does liberalism have its limits or must tolerance extend to include the intolerant? Fortuyn and Van Gogh both said no and, in doing so, spoke out against more absolutist understandings of Islam. In that, their lives (and deaths) beg another apparent paradox: Does freedom of speech encompass the right to offend?
At one point, Van Gogh gives Fortuyn free rein to take the stage and say his piece. “I wanted to put some of the things that Pim Fortuyn says onstage,” Byrne continues. “They’re not necessarily rabidly racist statements, but they are racist.” Fortuyn’s speaking style was also oddly persuasive: not rabble-rousing, but subtle and self-deprecating.
That combination makes the show all the more troubling and the company has already been accused by one Austrian teacher of giving Fortuyn’s views an unwarranted platform. But Byrne trusts his audience – young as they are – to decide for themselves. “In political oratory, you can find yourself listening to argument and you sort of go, ‘OK, I kind of align myself with that’. Then, ‘Hang on, I see where this is going. No I don’t.’”
In some ways, Pim and Theo allows that young audience a safe space to encounter “the politics of the right and of racial identity that can,” Byrne believes, “be beguiling.” He points to Nigel Farage’s charm, such as it is, as being based in mischievous humour and “a wink” that somehow makes politics human. Fortuyn did something similar by reflecting people’s actual concerns, fracturing traditional distinctions between left- and rightwing politics.
Pim and Theo leaves enough space for its audience to unpick those tangled values. It’s almost forum theatre: at times questions hang in the air, seemingly awaiting an answer. Byrne never wanted to “teach or preach a position” and so much of the key factual and biographical information is built into the installation-like set, which audience members explore after the show.
That’s actually rather fitting. Teenagers – certainly British teenagers – are unlikely to be familiar with either Fortuyn and Van Gogh and, detached from context, both become abstracted. It cools the controversy around these men and allows us instead to think of local equivalents: Nick Griffin, Tommy Robinson, Godfrey Bloom.
That makes the debate about freedom of speech and its limits particularly resonant. Byrne sees a conclusion in there: “that we should celebrate our right to say whatever we want, but we don’t always have to say it. That’s from Theo van Gogh’s father: he says, ‘I totally believed in my son’s right to say what he wants, but I sometimes wish he wouldn’t feel compelled to do so straight away.’”
Another parallel springs to mind in Britain, from the very public nature of their respective deaths. When we learn that van Gogh’s killer tried to decapitate him, it’s impossible not to think of Drummer Lee Rigby. NIE were rehearsing the show at the time of his murder. It shocked them, but didn’t necessarily surprise them. “We tend to believe that violence is much further from the surface than it really is,” says Byrne. He points to violence – “some of it in our name” – happening overseas, though insists that it does not “ameliorate or excuse” Rigby’s murderers.
If there’s a danger in Pim and Theo, it’s that the piece doesn’t represent either Fortuyn or Van Gogh’s killers. Doing so leaves the two murders ambiguous. It risks making decisive action look more impactful than decisive speech and allowing those murders – both with specific motives – stand for anything and everything.
“I didn’t feel we owed them any right to speak,” says Byrne, recognising it as a “glaring omission” that he hopes will force spectators to consider the motivations and implications of that decision. It’s a rare piece of theatre that trusts teenagers to that extent.