Sleepless in Sterdam*

This week I “worked off” a lot of people’s behaviour. I started out my week by wondering what all the noise in the street was, deciding that it was football-related. As the week went on, so did the noise, even though there were no big football matches going on. I finally found out from some neighbours that there was a nine-day Moroccan wedding celebration going on a few doors down. The bride was 18 years old and getting married to a man from Utrecht. My neighbours told me that there had been a lot of hugging and crying between mother and daughter and I joked to my almost-ten daughter that she certainly wouldn’t be allowed to move away that far if she ever got married. (I wasn’t actually joking.)

It has been incredibly hot in Amsterdam so we have had all our windows and doors open, which allowed some heat to go out and a whole lot of noise to come in. In the evenings, I danced on the balcony with my kids but when I tried to sleep, it was less fun.

Thursday night was the last class of my wonderful Thursday evening class. (You can see them in the photo below. Two of them were unfortunately not there and we missed them!) We have had our ups and downs, but they are really a wonderful lot and made huge progress in our ten sessions together. I am very glad that many of them are coming into the advanced class in September. They did cold readings of short two-hander scenes, then learned a few lines the Meisner way and did them again off-book. They stayed open and connected to each other, resulting in some very moving, funny and unexpected moments. Afterwards, they decided to go for a drink and chips and despite a very strong desire to go with them and my love of chips, I forced myself to go home and try to sleep. But the music kept on, accompanied now by roaring motorbikes. Having just learned the week before that I had lost hearing in my left ear, I was surprised by just how much I could hear and worried that the bikes might cause me to lose more.

On Friday night I did front of house for Orange Theatre Company, Amsterdam’s wonderful English-language theatre company of which I am proud to be a member. The journey there was infuriating as Amsterdam is in the process of trying to reduce the number of cars on the road, which apparently means making life for cyclists hell as most of the main and many random side streets are closed. I think the current mayor may not be the best at logistics … At this point, my rage was at such a pitch that I was ready to throw some of the insanely large SUVs clogging up the streets into the canals. (I know now for sure that when I hit my 70s, I am going to be one of those fantastically grumpy old ladies that clears a room in seconds. I can’t wait.)

The play is called Sweet Sixteen and is an English translation of a Dutch play by Casper Vandeputte. It’s about two teenage sisters, one of whom has committed suicide, and their attempt to make sense of life, death and everything in between. There was some great music in there too. No matter how many times I go to the theatre, I never remember to bring a hanky, which is exceedingly stupid of me as I always end up weeping, whether from sorrow, joy or fury. If I don’t weep, it’s a really bad show. Well, obviously I wept for all of the reasons. Buckets. And had to dash home, in a mess of tears, weaving my way through blocked roads and oblivious tourists, feeling more homicidal by the moment.

Once back in my hood, I encountered a performance group making use of the local market square, or plein in Dutch, which now cleared of market stalls turned out to be a circle, that most theatrical and equality-inducing shape. I fantasised about doing the performance piece I am working on there before moving on through the cooling air. Phrases from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets wandered through my head colliding with Billie Eilish in a not unpleasing way. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality/When we all fall asleep where do we go?” I was desperate to find out the answer to that question but the music kept on blasting and sleep never came.

Looming up on Saturday was a dreaded headshot session. I struggle with these like many actors and I was trying out a new photographer too. Somehow, I always end up not sleeping the night before and going in looking more beast than beauty. (To be clear, I am totally down with playing the beast over the beauty, but even a beast needs sleep to be at its beastliest.)

In the morning, I stumbled in to my photoshoot with all my worst fears realised. The home-made black banana and oat face mask I had made that morning didn’t deliver the promised miracle, although it did make my children scream in terror, and my hair was not co-operating with me. I turned up trailing my tail of woe to the photographer, who instantly gave me iced vegan coffee and a look of sympathy. Dear reader, she was just what I needed and I can heartily recommend her! She took on my mess of a face and Bellatrix hair and made me smile despite it all. She also played more great music the whole time she snapped away and made the beast as human as it was possible to be.

Still, the beast raged on inside me. That evening, a friend and I went to Hez ya Mez, a DJ’d night of Middle Eastern music and gender-bending belly dance at the fantastic Mezrab. The irony of paying to dance to Arabic music after having danced to it free all week long was not lost on me. Of course, it wasn’t really free – I had paid with my sleep and by this point I was in major sleep debt. The evening was wonderful – incredible hip action by the male belly dancer loosened the hinges of our jaws to the floor – and we wafted our hands joyfully through the hot air. After a while, we headed out for some cool. As we chatted, I observed someone casually throw their cigarette butt into the drainage system. NOT COOL. I was angry with myself for not having intervened in time but I resolved to start banging on about it to everyone from now on to make up for it. Cigarette butts are made of plastic and toxic heavy metals so they do not break up in the ground and cause serious damage to our ecosystems. They are the biggest source of micro-plastic in the world and people who would never dream of throwing anything else onto the ground chuck their fag butts down without a thought. Heartbreakingly, birds and other wild life end up eating them. In 2019, someone photographed a Black Skimmer carefully feeding its chick a cigarette butt. I know many highly educated and very caring people who have no idea about this so don’t feel bad if this applies to you, but please pass the word on. A move to ban the filters (which actually offer little to no protection, surprise, surprise) is on the way in the EU; in the meantime, we must dispose of our butts in an appropriate fashion.

I went home at 1am and finally had a half-decent night as the wedding was the next day and the bride was certainly not going to get married looking like a beast. But I was woken early the next morning by the fierce heat and more noise than even before. The djembes and the dancing were in full swing and many neighbours who hadn’t escaped to the seaside were out on their balconies, waiting for a glimpse of the bride. (We never got to see her. My daughter wondered if she’d escaped out the back …)

The last straw came when four or five motorbikes roared ceaselessly under my window and firecrackers were let off making the noise level truly unbearable. I marched into the street, determined to ask the family politely but firmly to tell the motorbike riders to stop. The first couple I approached outside the bride’s house, now decorated with a flowery arch, was an older couple. I congratulated them on the young woman’s wedding and said I would really appreciate it if the motorbikes stopped trying to break the sound barrier. They nodded sympathetically and told me it would soon be over. I could tell that they wanted it to be over themselves. They were clearly not in a position to ask the motorcyclists to pipe down and the bikers themselves were off on one of their journeys at that moment. I approached a slightly younger man and asked him if he could tell the bikers to take a break. He was not happy. He told me to shut up, go home and mind my own business. There was a very strong whiff of misogyny about him and it made me very angry indeed. I told him firmly that he did not get to tell me when to speak and when to shut up. A young man stood near by. I told him how I felt. He said not a word but looked at me full of kindness and understanding, even though my Dutch was slipping more and more into English. At this point, the other man started yelling angrily at me again and told me to go home if I didn’t like it. To my point that the noise was driving the whole street mad, he shouted “I don’t care!” I turned to the young man, who was still patiently standing next to me and was now motioning to the other man to calm down. “This,” I said, “this I-don’t-care is what’s breaking the world!” The young man nodded his head in what looked like agreement. The older man walked away and, shaking my head like a disgusted grandma, I started to walk away too. I don’t remember exactly what happened next, but I ended up in another altercation with a woman who told me she also “didn’t care”, that I should go home and stop bullying her and that it was “tradition”. I didn’t think it was anyone’s tradition to ruin their neighbours sleep but of course I didn’t come up with that until after I’d stormed off, shouting a few sarcastic phrases in English and Farsi to anyone who stared at me. I walked round the corner heading for the cooling atmosphere of the park and noticed a stream of cars waited to turn into our little street, honking their cars joyfully. Only then did I realise that it really was over and that I know how to pick my moments …

Of course, I am not proud of having shouted or of not having tried to have the conversation sooner. (Although I had earlier tried to communicate with the bikers from my top-floor street-facing balcony; unsurprisingly, they either couldn’t or wouldn’t hear me). I learned a few things from this experience. One, there’s only so much noise I can take before I break. Two, misogyny really winds me up. Three, there’s a conversation to be had with my neighbours (although I have a feeling the loud bikers were from the groom’s family). Four, if I lived in the Islamic Republic of Iran, I’m pretty sure I’d be dead by now. And five, it only takes one act of listening to diffuse a situation. I will forever be grateful to the young man who nodded his head while I ranted, not just for his kindness in that moment, but for reinforcing my faith in humanity. Even if only a few people in a group are willing to listen, a way forward is possible.

The week done, I noticed that a lot of people had signed up for my Meisner taster classes in July. I look forward to teaching the new students in September and all the moments that will bring. In the meantime, there is lots to do. Including going to my first ever school reunion in Oxford on Saturday. I will be taking an overnight bus from Amsterdam to arrive in London on time. I suspect my sleep debt is about to sprout compound interest …