AN IMPORTANT STORY
STARTED FOR ME IN THE POLANEN THEATER

Just after my academy of art in 1987

After I finished the art academy in 1987 I came to live in Amsterdam and lived with many other artists in the big hospital where my mother was still born and close to a good friend Nel Ploeg who was a mime and clown. I had once been allowed to work together with Nel and her fellow mime Gerard Verwer when, once in the far North of the Netherlands, they had wanted to familiarize the population with the then new form of art that had come to be called MIME. Mime was different from pantomime and it was often special in the language of the mimicry of man. In Amsterdam there was even a real mime school. Later, in that distant North, the once well-known mime group "Sufer Nufer" arose.

Investigation of the opara

Die Zauberflute

When I came to Amsterdam, I wanted to work with all television channels and I sent them all a letter with a proposal to work together. The only result turned out to be a conversation with the evangelical broadcaster and a small acquaintance with this broadcaster and the then sad image they had of imagining something in a professional way. People preferred to have cheap educational films from China, instead of wanting to invest in something and they did not have work for me. I then went on with my idea of ​​joining different arts in an opera. I researched Mozart's Zauberflote opera. The opera that could have meant a kind of Bible for my own father, according to his own words. Recently I went back to work using the HI-WI drawing technique with the story of the Zauberflute and could put it all a bit better and I realized that the story could never replace a real Bible.

But then I found this version of the famous opera and that turned out to be the first version

and I found that very beautiful!

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

Little Dorrit was the 11th novel of Charles Dickens.  The novel was published in installments from December of 1855 through June of 1857.

Dickens’s Life At The Time

• In 1855 Dickens has a disappointing reunion with Maria Winter (Maria Beadnell).  This incident was dramatized to become the reunion of Arthur Clennam and Flora Finching in Little Dorrit.
• The next year Dickens purchases Gad’s Hill Place.
• In 1857 Dickens meets Ellen Ternan.  He would eventually separate from his wife, Catherine, and would be involved with Ellen for the rest of his life.
• Maria Beadnell and Flora Finching

  In Little Dorrit Arthur Clennam becomes reacquainted with Flora Finching.  She was the love of his youth.  However time had not been kind to Flora:

• This scene was based on an incident in the life of Charles Dickens.  The first love of Charles Dickens was the delightful Maria Beadnell.  The relationship was a troubled one.  At that time Dickens was a young man with few prospects and Maria’s parents did not approve of the match.  Additionally Maria and Charles had a falling out at his 21stbirthday party.  They did not speak for twenty four years after that argument.

  

  Maria Beadnell

  In 1855 Maria, who had become Mrs. Henry Winter, contacted Dickens.  Although she warned him that she was no longer as he remembered, he was shocked by her appearance and personality.  That experience found its way into Little Dorrit.

• Marshalsea 

  

  Little Dorrit leaving the Marshalsea. Illustration by Phiz.

   

  The Marshalsea debtors’ prison plays a large part in Little Dorrit.  The novel opens there.  The Dorrits live there and eventually Arthur is imprisoned there.

  It was a common practice for the entire family to move into debtors’ prison, not just the family member declared insolvent.  The family members that were not convicted of insolvency could leave the prison during the day.  Some prisoners even had regular maid service during their incarceration.

  During Dickens’s lifetime very few people knew that Dickens’s father had been sent to Marshalsea for three months.  While his father was in prison Charles, then only twelve years old, was sent to work in a shoe-polish factory.  Dickens was deeply scarred by these incidents and rarely spoke of them.

  Theme of Little Dorrit

  The main theme of Little Dorrit is imprisonment.   The novel begins in a prison.  Mrs. Clennam is confined to her wheelchair.  Even the city echoes this theme:

  Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire despondency.

  The theme echoes throughout this dark novel.  There are loveless marriages, incompetent government offices and the stifling influence of society.

  However at the end of the novel some characters find freedom.  Some through the truth, some through death and some through love.

  They all gave place when the signing was done, and Little Dorrit and her husband walked out of the church alone. They paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, looking at the fresh perspective of the street in the autumn morning sun’s bright rays, and then went down.

On December 14, 2018 I go to a so-called DIckens evening in Rijswijk. I asked the question: Who was that Dickens? Many did not know the answer.