Interview

Based on one of Dutch director Theo van Gogh’s final works, it’s unlikely that the controversial auteur would have approved of Teunkie Van Der Sluijs’s cosy update to his 2003 film Interview. The ex-columnist was a man who delighted in promoting provocative opinions, even if this ultimately cost him his life the following year.

It’s unlikely that van Gogh saw his assassin until it was too late. The great-grandnephew of the famous painter, he had recently released Submission, a ten-minute short he had made with Dutch-Somali writer and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Through the words of four Muslim women, the film highlighted the violence against women in Islamic societies. It had led to death threats for him and Hirsi Ali but van Gogh shrugged them off and carried on as he had always done. A few years after 9/11, anything which appeared to be pro- or anti-Muslim was going to be get someone angry and van Gogh was always keen to stir the pot to see what bubbled up.

On a frosty Amsterdam morning in November 2004, he was cycling to work when 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan citizen Mohammed Bouyeri shot him several times. Bouyeri pinned a note to his chest (another death threat to Hirsi Ali to add to the others) and then sliced through van Gogh’s throat, almost decapitating him according to reports at the time. The brutal murder reverberated through this famously tolerant society, even after the killer was arrested, charged and sentenced to life in prison. Liberals and conservatives alike were up in arms as they came to term with this brutal event. Hirsi Ali went into hiding and in 2006 emigrated to the US.

Scroll forward to 2025 and - after a 2007 remake directed by and starring Steve Buscemi - Interview has been revived as a two-hander and brought up to date to the influencer era. Robert Sean Leonard, an actor probably best known as “the guy in House who is not House” thanks to his eight-season tenure in the shadow of Hugh Laurie’s iconically grouchy TV doc. Leonard plays the grouchy press journo Pierre who is grouchy mostly because, as his paper’s senior political analyst, he feels he should be in Washington covering the imminent resignation of his nemesis Vice President Dunne. Instead, his editor has instructed him to interview the mononymic Katya, an influencer-slash-actor-slash-whatever their agent throws at them. She’s young, blonde and late by at least an hour, he’s looking to get something juicy from her for the Sunday edition so he can fly to DC and ask the VP some rather pointed questions.

As Katya, Paten Hughes is on paper an inspired choice for the star who stays constantly in touch with fans through internet broadcasts. The American has a few acting credits in New York but is best known as the star and co-creator of Bekah Brunstetter’s Heirloom, a web series that streamed on Vimeo and has had over 4.5 million views. On stage, she is miked up which gives her voice a bit more of an intense and artificial tone than Leonard’s more natural projected timbre. That makes for a slightly uneven playing field between combatants who - while very different in age, background and outlook - are here to face off in a modern battle of the wits.

In his original film, van Gogh’s masterstroke was to cast real-life television personality Katja Schuurman as the starlet. By choosing someone who was already a media darling for events in her private and professional life, he lifted the basic well-trodden premise to something deliciously meta-fictional. Van Der Sluijs’s adaptation sadly takes the film’s storyline at face value which, even with its glossy ultra-modern sheen, fails to shed fresh light on what we saw over two decades ago.

That Hughes has a limited acting range is neither here nor there: this isn’t the most nuanced or rounded role we’ll see this year or any year while Leonard doesn’t particularly convince either as the old school journo. There are a few sharp edges to their tete-a-tete but it’s all too predictable. The worst that can be said about them (and this play) is that, by the end, we don’t really care who comes out on top.

Interview continues at Riverside Theatre until 27 September.


Photo credit: Helen Murray