When Eline Arbo informed her mother at a young age that she wanted to be a theatre director, her mother told her that it would take more than talent and hard work to become a truly great artist – you had to be respectful and caring, too. She remembers her mother telling her that “a lot of great artists are terrible people, and a lot of lovely people are mediocre artists. The hardest thing is to combine the two.”
Today the 38-year-old Norwegian is still striving to meet the high bar set by her mother at no less exposed a workplace than one of the best-known theatres in Europe. Having made a name for herself in her native country and the Netherlands with productions that wedded style and playfulness, Arbo has been the artistic director of Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA) since last September.
Under her predecessor Ivo van Hove, the ITA became a cultural powerhouse, globally touring its sleek productions, many of which were directed by Van Hove himself. Its stage production of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life was the most recent in a string of international hits.
By the time Van Hove announced that he would be stepping down after 22 years in the post, Arbo was already an associate artistic director at ITA, having gained a reputation for her emotionally nuanced, music-fuelled brand of theatre. (Arbo often works closely with her partner and collaborator, the composer and musician Thijs van Vuure.)
Her inventive and energetic production of Édouard Louis’ The End of Eddy, performed inside a parachute-like structure that expanded over the course of the performance, split the role of the protagonist between four actors who frequently launch into Radiohead numbers. Her production of Penthesilea – recently announced as part of this year’s Edinburgh international festival programme – is a propulsive account of the love between Achilles and the Queen of the Amazons, staged like a gig with the cast wielding electric guitars.
Her production of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, performed on a constantly revolving stage, was recently remounted by the Royal Theatre in Denmark, while her take on Nobel-winner Annie Ernaux’s The Years, in which five female actors play the protagonist at different stages of her life, opens at the Almeida theatre in London this summer.
For her first in-house production at ITA – after a touring version of Suzie Miller’s polemical Prima Facie – Arbo is tackling a contemporary Dutch classic, Connie Palmen’s divisive debut novel The Laws.
Published in 1991, this account of a young philosophy student who has a series of encounters with older men, trying to find her voice, is a cultural phenomenon in the Netherlands, but, coming from Norway, Arbo didn’t encounter it growing up; when she read it recently, “I was very surprised at how much I recognised myself in it.”
The Laws is the concluding part of a loose trilogy based on novels with a focus on self-discovery, together with Cunningham’s The Hours and Ernaux’s The Years.
In Palmen’s book, the protagonist Marie encounters only men on her journey, but, in Arbo’s staging, Marie – played with vigour by Ilke Paddenburg – also has liaisons with women. While the novel can, she says, be read as a critique of the patriarchy, Arbo was less interested in this aspect. She included women because they have been instrumental in shaping her life, including inspiring her to study in Amsterdam. “I wanted to focus less on what a woman can be in this society, as I’ve done that in my previous performances, and more on finding your own voice.”
Arbo is originally from Tromsø, north of the Arctic Circle, where it was “always dark in the winter and light in the summer”. She grew up in a very politically engaged family. “We went on a lot of demonstrations,” she says. At an early age her mother took her and her older sister to the theatre, and while her sister was scared, Arbo remembers being riveted. “This was the place to be.”
She set her sights on becoming a director, studying first at the University of Oslo then at the Theaterschool Amsterdam. After completing her studies in 2016, she worked between Norway and the Netherlands, winning acclaim in both countries. Coming from Norway gives her a valuable perspective on Dutch society as “an outsider looking in”.
Now she’s taken over from Van Hove as head of the globally renowned ITA and is conscious of the weight of that responsibility. “He’s an amazing director and I want to be respectful of the repertoire he has built here, while also developing my own pieces,” she says. Arbo doesn’t feel she has to change things overnight, or even in a year’s time. Change will be gradual, she says.
She has big ambitions for the theatre in terms of sustainability, hoping to make the ITA the most sustainable historic theatre in the Netherlands, while remaining committed to touring work internationally and programming international artists, including the UK’s Rebecca Frecknall. “We strongly believe it is important to present people with different perspectives of the world.”
Theatre, Arbo says, is still capable of generating empathy in an increasingly polarised society. “It’s very important these days to try to empathise with each other and try to see the world through each other’s eyes. Of all the art forms that allow you to do that, theatre is the best.”
She believes the stage has the capacity to change the world. “Some might find that an absurdly naive statement, but I believe that if you can have one person change the way they look at the world or look at themselves, or how we live together in society, then you can plant the ideas that can become a revolution.”
The Years is at the Almeida theatre, London, 27 July-31 August. Penthesilea will play at the Lyceum, Edinburgh, 3-6 August, as part of Edinburgh international festival. The Laws is at the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam from 22 August to 1 September.
