Neerlands Hoop: Neerlands Hoop Express

This comedy/theatre show is the sequel to 'Micha Wertheim: Somewhere Else'. This second show starts exactly where the first show ended: in the same theatrical scenery, with the same robot. But this time Wertheim surprises his audience by showing up. He tells about how the first experimental comedy show was received and contemplates about the magic of theatre and art in a society about the right to exist of art in a society that allows less and less doubt and confusion. When Robot falls into a depression, the boundaries between theater and reality begin to blur.

Award-winning artist Wim Helsen proves in his fifth theater performance that he not only has deep, absurd thoughts, but is also a good listener.

Registration of the matinee performance written by the Dutch comedian Youp van 't Hek, commissioned by Toneelgroep Centrum.

Micha Wertheim asks himself and his audience how to live and survive in a gloomy future perspective. Populism seems to have been taken for granted by both right-wing and left-wing parties. Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism seem to be increasing. The planet is dying. The factory farming industry is still booming. We have reached a dead end and we are standing with our noses against a blank wall. All we can do now is turn around to see how we got here, with our backs against the wall.

Registration of the theatre program by the Dutch musical comedy duo Het Monica Da Silva Trio (Tim Kamps and Arjen Lubach).

Registration of the second theatre program by the Dutch comedian Paulien Cornelisse.

The debut of this Dutch comedy duo. They won the Dutch Cameretten festival which a short (early) version of this show.

TV recording of the hommage to the Dutch lyricist Jurrian van Dongen. Van Dongen wrote countless song lyrics for theater and television. He has been writing for the children's program Het Klokhuis for decades. He also writes for theater programs by Wende Snijders, Jenny Arean, Paul de Leeuw, Alex Klaasen and many others. In addition, he was a teacher at a cabaret academy for a new generation of lyricists.

The bigger the audiences for Dutch comedian Micha Wertheim’s shows became, the less he had to do to make them laugh. In one early show, he suggested that the audience would be better off without him. So in 2016, he acted upon this suggestion with an experiment that made theater history: he wasn't physically present onstage but somewhere else. The audience wasn't aware of this in advance, though they did get a hint in the form of a pre-recorded "live" radio interview from a remote studio. "I see my audience as my children," Wertheim says in this interview. "You have to educate them, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 15 years. At first you have to constantly be there watching them, but there comes a time when you have to trust them to get on with it without you." With some help from a robot, a printer, a stereo and a set of headphones, the members of his audience were able to make their own performance.