The two faces of theatre: Artwashing

I am an outsider. A rookie abstract painter, a chef, and a one-off Shakespearean actor. I jumped on stage to impress my wife, the real thespian. That play showed me the massive stress crushing players and crew. I’m not qualified to draw the same breath as people putting their livelihoods on the line night after night. They are heroes, with a freedom of expression most only dream of. It’s so damn inspiring.

The other evening, I watched independent theatre that moved me so deeply I couldn't rationalise it. These performances are embedded in my brain. I want to shout about it, but to who? Is independent theatre promoted, protected, and valued?

I looked into how Amsterdam artwashes itself. While good people are at the heart of "let's make Amsterdam great for creatives," the city ultimately treats artists like a commodity. It’s the age-old Gentrification Trap (Broedplaatsen): move creatives into deprived areas to drive up property values, let developers move in, and then shove the artists to the next place. For a city priding itself on its image, this is absolute madness. We need rental caps. Theatre companies shouldn't have to operate as corporate entities, stripping their identity just to survive a mountain of paperwork.

Branding arms like amsterdam&partners monetize the image of the rebel to build a "cool factor" for wealthy expats and tech giants. But you cannot have artistic freedom when basic apartments and rehearsal spaces cost thousands. By failing to protect affordable spaces, the city is starving the ecosystem they brag about.

The municipality claims they are trying. Through the Kunstenplan, they use nice words about "direct support." They are even acting as a defensive shield right now, using local budgets to protect the scene from brutal national budget cuts and VAT (BTW) hikes from The Hague.

Yet, the execution remains frustratingly corporate. The city faces massive backlash for its forced turnover policies (doorstroomregeling) in creative hubs, where artists who spent years building a community face eviction notices to "make room for new blood." They are trying to solve an arts crisis with the exact bureaucratic tools that caused it. It is unacceptable, unsustainable, and rotten.

The community will be slowly driven out until there is no art left to sell. The solution? The only one that has ever existed: resist. 
Resist, force gentrification to move on, and pressure elected officials. All creatives are essential workers – so fuckin essential – if this city wants to keep its image.

I would like to share some voices actually within the industry who feel this pain on a day-to-day basis.

William Sutton: Actor & Director
Check out Williams upcoming plays @shakespeare_in_amsterdam

The stage has been my home for decades, from the UK and US to Amsterdam. It is a magical place where the troubles of the world stop and the imagination begins. Over the years, I’ve worked on stage and film with celebrities, and I teach acting and accent reduction to anyone eager to learn. Whether I am performing for global Shakespeare scholars at the Sorbonne or scrubbing the toilets of a rented theatre for first-time student actors, I am driven by pure passion.

What is acting? It’s being present under imaginary circumstances. For the audience, it’s an invitation to leave the outside world at the threshold and step into a reality built word by word.

Theatre demands endless, invisible hours to embody an experience. Yet in Amsterdam, making this magic happen on a community level is an extreme sport.

Let’s talk numbers. The biggest hurdle is space. Renting a rehearsal room costs €65 to €80 an hour. A tiny 90-seat theatre runs €500 to €800 a night. To put on a simple four-night production, properly paying eight actors, a director, and covering space, you need to raise €18,000.

Yet, to keep community theatre accessible, tickets stay around €12.50. Sell out completely, and you might make a €400 profit, just enough to rent the room for one more night. You have to be a financial genius to produce on a shoestring, especially since the Netherlands doesn't yet offer the tax-deductible donation incentives found in the US.

So why do it? Because if you can touch the soul of just one person, every hour is worth it. Plus, science shows that art literally slows biological aging!

We need solutions: affordable spaces and systemic change. I propose a think tank blending amateurs, pros, city staff, accountants, and teenagers to re-imagine the future. Everyone has a right to art.

While places like Flanders and Ireland now offer artists a basic income, the Dutch, powerfully supported by expats, are keeping the fire alive on sheer grit. We are inspiring the next generation to get off their smartphones and play. My productions feature cast members from age 9 to 80; often, today's audience becomes tomorrow's cast...

If you have friends doing theatre and you want to support pre-book their shows, don’t wait until the last minute. Be the first one to buy the ticket that will help any actor and director more than you think! 

Lolu Ajayi: Actor, Writer, Director
I moved to Amsterdam in 2005 to work for a company called Boom Chicago. I worked there for 12 years as an Actor/Writer/Improviser, while often playing different unofficial directorial roles. While I was there, I worked on 16 revues or main stage shows. Typically, once a year the company would create a brand-new stage show. Half scripted, half improvised with a predetermined theme, decided by the corporate department for marketing reasons that had to be infused into the show. 

I left Boom in 2017 to focus more on onscreen projects, but still do theatre whenever I can get a chance. I feel a bit privileged to be honest, I’m one of the lucky ones, but I see a lot of talent around me that have different situations than I do.

The landscape has changed incrementally over time.

Artistry has come under fire from many different directions. Whether it’s AI, corporate interference or control from gatekeepers or even the oversaturation of participants in the art form as art has become a generic hobby for a lot of people which automatically makes the artist less respected by the general public. 

Art is supposed to examine life, but what happens when people generally no longer have an appetite for the truth? 

We live in an age where social media has shortened our attention spans and primed us to continually look for the next shiny thing. This has reshaped and reforged how art is made. The algorithm plays a huge role in this. Attention is currency and everyone is fighting for it. 

Unfortunately, the process of art often takes time, patience, and space – both the creation and the consumption of it. 

Long ago, way before corporations took an interest in performance arts, the artist was just an artist. When Gatekeepers saw the potential of the artist, they created the celebrity. That was the artist’s main trap perhaps because it was an untenable situation. Celebrity became something to aspire to and, like Andy Warhol predicted, we now live in an era where everyone is famous for 15 minutes.

If video killed the radio star perhaps then… celebrity killed the artist?

Many institutions that house artists and performance arts have been changing focus over the years for financial reasons. The induction of the HOBBYIST into performance arts has been a way to keep a lot of lights on and doors open, but there has been a dramatic effect from this shift. The artist is secondary at best and has become an afterthought. There’s the celebrity, the hobbyist... and then the artist. 

Don’t get me wrong. There’s a place for everyone. Career artists, hobbyists, even people who use performance art to substitute therapy.  But the issue is the table that has historically and primarily been set for artists has changed focus.
The artistic table is no longer set for artists, so artists must struggle even harder to get their art out in the world that seems to have forgotten what role art plays.

Diego Best: Actor
I don't have any uncles or aunts with an artistic hobby, no cousins with an interest in sculpture or theatre. My childhood friends are mostly some kind of engineer. My love and passion for theatre and acting developed the way these things sometimes must: imperceptibly slow for the longest time and then so fast that it seemed almost irresponsible.

Looking back, it's easy enough to spot the trail of breadcrumbs that led me to this passion: an open mic joke contest when I was six; a school play at eight; a storytelling class at ten; etc. And none of those moments would've existed without someone with more passion than financial ambition behind them. The open mic wasn't held again; the group facilitating the school play didn't get a grant the following year; public library funding was cut; and the storytelling teacher couldn't afford to keep teaching the class without the funding.

I made it to the other side now.

I went thousands of euros into debt in order to pay for acting schools, movement classes, voice lessons. My teachers are brilliant and accomplished artists, each with decades of teaching experience and every last one of them struggles to make ends meet.

Over the course of the last five years, I've been fortunate enough to be part of dozens of theatrical projects, of all sizes. The common denominator in every project is, again, someone driven more by passion than financial sense. Despite nearly all of the projects being performed to sold out audiences, I can count on one hand how many of them did more than break even.

I've seen the Amsterdam theatre community explode since the lifting of COVID measures and now, in this nascent age of so-called artificial intelligence, people are desperate for human connection and I see audiences flocking to live performance. And in response the government has only further cut funding for the arts.

Actors are cheap; we're desperate, we'll perform for the promise of a hot meal. Theatres are not. Theatres are expensive. Rehearsal spaces even more so. We need support to keep making art. There is no world where a city can both provide less funding for the arts and fewer artistic spaces, but still maintain, let alone develop, an artistic scene.

We'll find our audiences. They're there and they're hungry. We just need a chance to survive until then. Finding my way into the arts took every bit of life I've lived so far; I just want to not be forced to live meal to meal and month to month in order to keep doing it.

They say you are always hardest on those you love and believe in the most. The ball is in your court Amsterdam, we all know you can do better for your theatre creatives, and you must. They are the life blood of this melting pot of a city. For fuck’s sake, look after the beating heart.