Hugo Koolschijn

In Roman tragedies, Ivo van Hove and Jan Versweyveld have created a unique arena in which Shakespeare speaks about our time more than ever and the political game in all its facets.

In Kings of War, director Ivo van Hove focuses on political leadership. The original texts were retranslated by Rob Klinkenberg and then thoroughly adapted: the Hundred Years' War between England and France, and the Rose Wars between the houses of Lancaster and York for the English throne, which are emphatically present as a historical context in the original pieces, were referred to the background in the adaptation in order to accommodate a varied portrait of successive kings. As leaders in times of political instability and war, they show remarkable affinities with world leaders today.

Seven friends meet up for dinner and decide to play a revealing game. During the evening deep personal secrets will surface and threaten their relationships.

Nights can be long inside Naomi and Ram’s room. Tonight, they have invited Marina over and their messy space is under scrutiny. Exploring intimacy as a personal playground and the skin as an intimate map, Naomi’s docile body unravels in the tension inside a room she keeps grasping and losing. The small child within her is itching to giggle through the night, before the break of day.

It is election night. Oedipus is on the verge of a massive victory. The country has not known a leader for many years since Laius' death. The ambitions are great. Oedipus wants to create a future, create a new way of life. He also insists, if elected, that the investigation into the death of his predecessor is reopened. In the meanwhile, in the half-empty campaign headquarters, Oedipus is surprised by his family - mother, wife and children - with a dinner. An old incident is thereby brought up. Gradually, Oedipus discovers that his past is very different from what he has always thought. During his research, the pieces of the puzzle fall together. Oedipus tries to control his fate, but discovers that he has been seeing blind all along.

It's Indy's birthday, but she doesn’t have money to treat her friends. Still, she doesn’t want to show up empty-handed. How will she solve this problem?

An assistant prosecutor zealously pursues a conviction in the case of a pediatric nurse accused of murdering her patients, but doubt arises when her evidence shows that the infants may have died of natural causes.

When the work of a great writer meets an imaginative child's mind, something special happens. Tom is twelve years old and devours tomes. When he and his parents stay in a chic hotel and he turns the last page of his book, the adventure does not end for him. The next morning, the staff greets him cordially and politely. Goodbye, Mr. Bukowski! For them, too, it was a memorable night.

The seventeen year old Stach is faced with five impossible assignments he has to complete in order to become king. Things do not go as easily as the boisterous Stach had expected, especially when he is confronted with matters of life and death.

This cross-media documentary (film, installation and website) explores the life and writings of Daniel Paul Schreber. Now famous as an Outsider Artist, Schreber was a successful lawyer, who in 1893, started to receive messages from God via a ‘Writing Down Machine’ that spanned the cosmos. He spent the next nine years confined to an asylum. This is his story.

A lonely boy, who lives in Amsterdam with his refugee mother from Kosovo, keeps getting into trouble while yearning for her acceptance. But the traumas caused by the war, which his mother hides away from him, turn his world upside down.

The witness walks through the corridors of a courthouse, a floating camera following her. In a pale flashback, she is sternly interrogated by two policemen. In her flashbacks during the examination, we see the events, which seem realistic, but repeatedly turn out to be as changeable and unreliable as the human memory. At a great pace, the three narrative threads take turns, while the witness grows more and more anxious.

Erik is a Dutch ten year-old schoolboy who is studying insects at school, and gets shown and explained a bit about them by his kind and knowledgeable nature-loving grandfather, whose country estate is a good place to do so and turns out to have a book on insects, which allows Erik to pass for one night, rather like Alice in Wonderland, as a miniature man among thus giant-looking, talking insects, who discuss their and other species and their lives with him, mainly winged ones, such as bee, fly and wasp.

No synopsis available yet.

A weekend in the life of a bizarre family in the sixties. Their lives will never be the same after it.

Two 16-year-old boys are tired of their small and boring hometown and decide to leave.

Onno (30) applies for a dream job as curator in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. He makes it through to the last round with the arrogant yuppie Alex. The younger and self-assured Alex seems to have a better chance of getting the job and Onno will not tolerate that. A few days before the last interview, he kidnaps his opponent and locks him up in a remote cottage that his girlfriend has just inherited near a railway line. As soon as he gets the job, he releases his victim. Three years later - Onno now lives together and has a son - he is a successful curator at the Rijksmuseum and needs an assistant. While interviewing applicants, he is confronted with Alex, now blind in one eye.

The story of the murder of Dutch comedian Jean-Louis Pisuisse and his wife, by the hands of jealous singer Tjakko Kuiper. Based on Gerben Hellinga's play, and performed by the Publiekstheater.

Nico and Leo are getting married. Their entire family and both their exes are in attendance. Some of these are performing musical numbers on stage. But memories of the war and the fact that Leo's mother died in a concentration camp keeps coming to the forefront.

Television registration of the play of the same name that Annie M.G. Schmidt wrote for Toneelgroep Amsterdam. In a side room of a congress building, mother, son and daughter await the arrival of father, who will be honored for his services in the pharmaceutical industry. But father is delayed; the meantime is filled with conversations. The mother turns out to be having a lesbian affair. The play was poorly received.

The lives of Erik Lanshof and five of his closest friends take different paths when the German army invades the Netherlands in 1940: fight and resistance, fear and resignation, collaboration and high treason.

An idealistic Dutch colonial officer posted to Indonesia in the 19th century is convinced that he can make the kinds of changes that will actually help the local people he is in charge of, but circumstances soon make him realize just how out of touch he really is, and it doesn't take long for things to go from bad to worse.

Otanes is certain that Smerdis, King of Persia is an impostor. He gathers together a group of people to stage a coup, only to face the question of which one of them will be worthy to take the throne.

Dutch television adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's play "Saint Joan".

Ivo van Hove's direction of Les Damnés had its world premiere as the opening performance of the Festival d'Avignon. This theatrical adaptation, based on a film script by Italian film director Luchino Visconti, shows how a family of rich German industrialists is fatally corrupted by its collaboration with the Nazi party that has come to power. Family patriarch Baron Joachim resists and is liquidated. The struggle for the succession leads to an escalation of intrigues and manipulations, betrayal and murder.