Der Bus nach Dachau / De bus naar Dachau

Schauspielhaus Bochum / De Warme Winkel

The relatively unknown story of a number of resistance fighters who, after the liberation of camp Dachau, were abandoned by the Dutch government and had to travel back to their motherland on their own. Where they, after arrival, only faced more opposition. Some of them travel the opposite way in 1995 to reminisce, but in East Germany they are soon confronted with dormant neo-Nazism. Has nothing changed then?

Run time 90 minutes
Genre Theater
Language German, with Dutch and English surtitles

In Gesprek Fri January 20
Opening night Tue January 17

Der Bus nach Dachau (De bus naar Dachau)

In 1995, a confrontational film script was rejected by the Dutch film fund. A script about the shadowy boundaries between good and evil within humans, in the ultimate age of good and evil: 1940 - 1945.
Maybe the film fund was just war-weary after Schindler's List, maybe the dialogues were too verbose for a movie, maybe the war in Yugoslavia deserved the lead for a while.
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In any case, this rejection condemned a life's work to oblivion. A life's work by Rutger Weemhoff, father of Ward, core member of De Warme Winkel.

As always in the oeuvre of De Warme Winkel, necessity and seriousness go hand in hand with humour and mischief. This time Vincent Rietveld and Ward Weemhoff, together with Lieve Fikkers, take on five German actors from the leading Schauspielhaus Bochum and relate to the inexhaustible story of the Second World War.

Reviews

trailer-Magazin

The show performs a grandiose balancing act between unadulterated analysis and black humour, taking both Hollywood's revisionism and Germany's handling of the past to task.

Volkskrant

Vintage De Warme Winkel.

With their first German performance Der bus nach Dachau, De Warme Winkel dances on a tightrope.

Nachtkritik

A painful, intelligent evening. (...) Everything sticks together, overwhelms and convinces. (...) But the evening is not a persiflage, it is too moving for that. There is no story with a guiding moral, it is too pluralistic for that. The Warm Shop offers us a one-and-a-half-hour counter-draft, against forgetting, against unity of fiction, against feeling only heavy, against ignorance, against silence. And with richly unanswered questions. This is quite unseemly. Good.

CREDITS

performance Lieve Fikkers, Vincent Rietveld, Ward Weemhoff and actors of Schauspielhaus Bochum Marius Huth, Risto Kübar, Lukas von der Lühe, Mercy Dorcas Otieno
concept, text and direction Vincent Rietveld, Ward Weemhoff
decor Theun Mosk (Ruimtetijd)
dramaturgy Dorothea Neweling
costumes Bernadette Corstens
light design Jan Hördemann
sound design Richard Alexander
directing assistant Stanislav Otremba
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artistic assistant Pace Veeger
decor assistant Ingrid Pons i Miras
costume assistant Lasha Iashvili
prompter Fee Sachse
first inspicient Nora Köhler
costume intern Finja van Heek
co-production Schauspielhaus Bochum and Internationaal Theater Amsterdam
with thanks to Rutger Weemhoff