Barbara “How would you describe your own work in terms of genre, atmosphere, themes?”

Bart “I think my work is a little fantastic. By that I don’t mean that it’s terribly good, but that it always involves a kind of fantasy. And that fantasy world means thoroughly examining all the images, events and atmospheres that arise in a person’s mind. I pry open that mind and show it on stage. Sometimes I do this in a restrained way, other times it’s more grotesque. It depends upon the starting point.”

Barbara “Do you prefer a specific target group – children, young people, adults?”

Bart “I like to have alert, attentive people in the audience who are prepared to go along with what I want to show. Among other things, this means they must be prepared enter a world that is slightly odd, a world whose codes they don’t know when they step into it. As a spectator, you have to learn how to move through the performance with us, as it were. And that can take a few minutes, it can take a quarter of an hour. That’s what I hear about my productions now and then.”

(…)

Barbara “Next season you are staging Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. I am very curious about the outcome, because this is a play and not a novel.”

Bart “The last few years I have adapted literary works, and I think the time has come to do a play. I’ve gone back to a playwright I read a long time ago, Ibsen.… I think Hedda Gabler is Ibsen’s harshest play. Hedda Gabler’s character is wonderful, and the rather spineless men who surround her are also very fascinating. Maybe I’m reading it wrongly, but I think Hedda Gabler is one of the few of Ibsen’s plays with humour – a biting humour. I’m looking forward to staging this play, and perhaps that also has to do with the previous things I’ve done, for instance a play like Gregoria, that also has a slightly grotesque form. Characters that hop around the stage like frightened rabbits, and are also a bit randy and slightly depraved. All of the actors I’ve chosen for this play are quite a bit older than the characters Ibsen had in mind. In this case, Ariane van Vliet plays Hedda Gabler – and Ariane is not 25. Nor are the men around her 30 or 35, but a lot older. To me, that’s a very comical proposition in itself.”

Barbara “So the idea is that this production will be comical?”

Bart: “Well, it’s a tragedy, you know, but I certainly hope that people will also laugh.… What you especially see is a woman in a man’s world who in terms of sensitivity and so forth is superior to the men around her. And who in fact does not succeed in really manifesting herself and then takes her own life. It’s certainly about a woman in a man’s world.”

Barbara “And about boredom? Doesn’t she say somewhere, the only reason I’ve been put in this world is to bore myself to death?”

Bart “Yes, it’s also about boredom.”