|
|
Onno van Gelder Jr - Director, Author and Actor |
|
We sat down recently with director, actor and author Onno van Gelder Jr,
speaking to us from his home in Belgium. With Christmas quickly
approaching perhaps a good place to begin would be with one of his five
authored books, De Kerst Slaper (The Christmas Sleeper), a book that is
also available in English.
Onno
(for sake of ease we may use Onno van Gelder Jr.’s first name
throughout), explains the story (no pun intended) behind the book, “I
have got five books until now. I have two collections of short stories,
I have two novellas, and I have one Christmas story. He repeats the
title in Dutch, De Kerst Slaper and in English it is The
Christmas Sleeper. It is based upon an old legend. It is from Veurne
which is a city in which I tend to work a lot during these past ten
years. They have this old legend about the inhabitants of the city which
are called Sleepers from Veurne.
During the middle ages the city was very wealthy and prosperous.
They made a certain type of cloth during that time. They had a lot of
merchants and a lot of workers. There was a depression during that
period and all the trade went to other cities. Those who were rich had
nothing to do and slept longer in the morning. Those who worked, didn’t
have work, so what would they do but sleep. That is why they were called
Sleepers It was a nickname for all of the inhabitants of Veurne. They
were all sleeping.
A little over four years ago, Veurne asked me to revive the legend with a story,
based upon the legend. I did not have to tell the legend, but there had
to be links to the legend. I created the Christmas story about a
character and his name is a French name Firmin Dorbien and his last name
in English means Sleep Well. I called him Firmin Sleep Well.
I received a very nice comment for that book. Someone said it was very
much like a story by Charles Dickens. It is without copying and without
being exactly the same. With that story it was written during the COVID
period. Veurne is a town and we have these Christmas markets every
winter in all the towns here in Belgium. Of course, during COVID, they
couldn’t do it. That is when they asked me if I could write something
about that legend. Then (they said) we will divide the story into
fourteen parts, which will be on huge panels and then people can walk
from panel to panel and read the whole story in their own family bubble.
It became so successful that the year after in a very ancient city hall
in Veurne they organized an exhibition around my book. Firmin lived in a
very large house at the beginning of the story, and they created his
dining room, his bedroom, and his study.”
Onno, without giving away any spoilers hints at another interesting
character in the book, named Odette, “Firmin was rich and he is a very
lazy person and he had a cook. Odette once burned his favorite cake and
he fired her for that. (However) at a certain point in the story, she is
the only one to help him out of a bad situation.”
Now before we continued talking about some of his other books, we wanted
to get back to what first drew us Onno van Gelder Jr. and that is his
work in the theater, especially with how busy he has been in 2025, so
much so that we wondered if he ever sleeps.
Laughing he says, “I do (sleep). I just love what I do. I don’t see what
I do as work. Sometimes I feel as though I haven’t worked at all,
because I enjoy it so much. It is work, because when you rehearse you
have to repeat it over again. When I write too, I can work for one or
two hours just on one or two sentences. It is work and I enjoy it and I
don’t see it as work.”
He muses about if his passion is stronger for directing, acting or
writing, “That is always a difficult question. The three areas are
linked. When I write I very often write for theater, but I do write
novellas and short stories as well. With acting it is linked with
directing. When you are a director, you can create everything. You give
directions to the actors and you create the setting and you can create
your own world. When you act you are at the service of. You can create
your character. Sometimes I do enjoy to not have to think about
everything, so that happens when you act. When you direct there is
always something that restricts you, maybe it is a big stage or a small
stage or they have lots of technique or they do not have much technique.
There is always something, there is always a limit. When you write it is
limitless. You can invent whatever you like and whatever you want.
I started as an actor and then I took up directing and then I took up
the writing. Maybe that is the order acting, directing and writing or
maybe writing, acting and directing.”
Where to begin? The futuristic, dystopian film project Plastic Hunger
caught our attention.
“Do you know the 48 hours film project? It is a festival and everybody
can participate. It is over 48 hours. On Friday evening at seven o’clock
the director gets all of the information and you have to create a short
film in forty-eight hours time. You don’t know (in advance) what it is
all about. You get three things. This year we had a wheel. You get a
sentence you have to use in the script and you get a theme. You have to
create something in forty-eight hours, which is quite a challenge. It
(takes place in) an apocalyptic world where there is very little food
and a lot of plastic and people have to collect plastic to collect food
stamps. I was the one deciding if they got food stamps or not and how
many food stamps they would get for a meal.
Just a few weeks before (the 48 hours film project) the director phoned
me and said I want to do a forty-eight hours film project and are you
free that weekend to film? Are you willing to (collaborate)? You have to
have a crew before joining. Nobody knew my character, so they had to
write the script over night, so we could start shooting on Saturday and
it has to be finished by Sunday evening.
That is the difficulty, which is the challenge and that is the fun of it
(that there is so little preparation time). You have to look for
locations as well and you can’t look for locations (in advance) because
you don’t know what your story will be.
In our film there was a man and his daughter who came to me to hand over
their plastic in order to get stamps. Later on, in the film the father
even cheats on his daughter, because he was hungry. The film shows how
far people can go if they really are hungry.”
He is currently working on Sound Of Money with actress and
producer Sabrina Culver whom we interviewed earlier this year.
“The project isn’t finished and it is together with Sabrina Culver. She
plays my wife. It is meant to be a series, so it is still in production.
We connected very well. It was a great match. We improvised a lot during
rehearsal. It is fun working with her,” he says.
Our conversation turns to theater and a play he directed called
Thirsty Throats, laughing he explains, “That was a comedy about a
winemaker. A lot of things happen. He wants to be a distributor to the
royal court. He is in love with a drug addict and some of the drugs end
up in his wine. On that day they come to check his wine to see if he can
get the award or not. That is why Thirsty Throats, because they
are drinking wine throughout the whole play. I really enjoyed doing that
one. People loved it from the beginning until the end. The good thing
about that play was, when I read comedies, I often have a smile, but
this time I was really laughing at home, alone. That was very good. It
also had a very surprising end and no one would expect it would end like
that,” Onno says.
Next, we turn to the play The Dinner and we are wondering at this
point if we should be in anticipation of one called Dessert. Ahh we can
only hope.
“This was a serious drama. I loved doing that one as well, because it
was a real challenge. It was about two couples and they have dinner in a
restaurant. They come into the restaurant and take their places at a
table and the whole play is (centered) around that table. That is very
challenging for the director and for the actors as well.
It is a good psychological play about people wearing masks and
pretending not to be who they are. I love extremes (We will keep the
spoiler quiet that he revealed, but let’s just say it is a deep, dark
secret the characters have in common.)
Something I cannot do is to direct only comedies all of my life. That is
not for me.
I started out as an actor and I played several years with this company
and then several years with that company and then a few years with
another company. They all worked differently and they had different
directors and for me it was very interesting to learn and to grow,
because of the challenge you get when you go outside of your
boundaries,” says Onno.
So, where and how did this all begin?
Onno van Gelder Jr., was born in Oostende, Belgium, the same city he now
lives in.
He indicates that his environment has influenced his creativity, “You
can notice that in my writing. I live very close to the sea and it is
very often a part of my writing. The sea is very inspiring to me and it
is calming as well. When I am learning my lines as an actor or I am
(preparing) as a director and get stuck, I don’t continue to sit at my
desk and think oh my god, this is not going to work, I am going to solve
it now. I just stand up, I take my coat and I have a short walk at the
seafront and when something automatically comes to my head, I think
okay, time to go home.
The advantage of our town is that it is the largest town on the coast,
but then our coast is only sixty-four kilometers. It is a large town,
not so busy, but busy enough. The means of communication are very good,
so you can go deeper down in our country to work. That is also why I
want to stay here. It is very easy to leave our city.”
We have to go back to Onno’s childhood to a time and a place when the
creative juices started to flow.
“I watched television really a lot, because my parents had a tearoom, so
I was home alone during the weekends. We could watch the BBC and ITV,
and I watched quite a few movies. I was a single child at that point, so
I tended to reenact those scenes that I saw and to impersonate the
characters I saw in the scene,” he says acknowledging that it not only
sowed the seeds for his acting, but also for his directing.
Onno van Gelder Jr. was sixteen and seventeen years old when he first
appeared on stage.
I was sixteen and seventeen. For the first play, I was rather tall and I
was coupled with a girl who was a year older and she was rather tall as
well. We made a wonderful couple and I enjoyed playing with her (he
smiles). I had a very large moustache (fastened) on. Oh yes, (he holds
his finger up as the idea comes to him) now I remember, I had the flu,
so I didn’t go to the last rehearsals and I didn’t go to the dress
rehearsal. I didn’t make the most important rehearsals, but I premiered
and it was my first play. It was my first time on stage. My parents
wrapped me completely in blankets and when I was ready, they picked me
up and put me into bed. I was ill on stage. It was a comedy.
The second play was also a comedy and I played an older character. Then
I had a beard, whiskers and moustache glued on and with very heavy
makeup and I had to appear for the first time in my underwear on stage.
Don’t ask me what the play was, I don’t know anymore. (Then he
remembers) It was called The Black Sheep of the Family. It was
fun doing it and I wanted to do more. My character’s name was Max.
He is somewhat of a William Shakespeare aficionado.
It is appropriate then to ask him about the time he directed Much Ado
About Nothing.
“When it is not a historical play I never look up (to see what others
have done). Afterwards I do look at those places. That is how I keep it
my own, by never looking up things. I do look up information about
Shakespeare. I try to make it my own thing by sticking to the play. I
dig into the play to find something I find interesting or something that
captures me in the play. Certain sentences, certain dialogues could mean
a lot to you. They can really touch you when you read a play. You can be
touched by a conversation between two characters. From there on I start
weaving my own view of the play. If I think that conversation is
important then I will build in around that conversation. As a director I
look for one sentence that I think says everything about that character,
then I start building,” he says.
Onno van Gelder Jr., talks about his attraction to the works of
Shakespeare, “It is timeless and so universal. The plots are very good
and he goes deep in his stories. There is so much in the characters.
There is so much in the plots. As an actor you can do so much with the
character you are playing, because they are so well developed. As an
actor you can (portray) many and different emotions in one role. You can
be humorous, you can be sad, you can be melancholic, you can be hurt.
There is so much in all of those characters.
I once saw a BBC production and they staged one of his plays in a
restaurant and it worked perfectly.”
He is a polyglot, speaking Flemish, English, French and Dutch, fluently.
Let’s revisit our conversation about your books and in particular let’s
talk about a very interesting book you authored, Escapades. Tell us
about this quote attributed to you, “Flowers are part of love, have
their own language, and receive a well-deserved place in this
collection.”
“I once visited the gardens of Versailles. I was very impressed by the
gardens and when I went to the museum shop, I saw a little book about
flowers. I picked it up and I started reading it. In the Victorian age
when they gave a bouquet of flowers that bouquet had a certain meaning.
Every flower had its own meaning. A rose is a symbol of love, but when
you gave a red rose that was a different message than when you gave a
yellow rose. When you combine all of those different flowers in a
bouquet you get something like a letter. It was used by couples who had
a secret lover. They didn’t send letters, because letters could be read
by everyone. A bouquet would vanish in a few days or you can rearrange
it into two or three bouquets and then you have no meaning at all.
I wanted to do something with that, so I wrote four short stories. In
those days you had a dictionary and it would explain the (meaning of
flowers). You could take a dictionary, look up the flowers, look up the
colors and you could read your bouquet. There is an addendum in the book
about the flowers I use. If you read the addendum and the stories you
get a much richer story. Then you know why the old man in the story is
sitting next to a pink camellia (Readers if you want to know why either
read the book or do some research. This writer did!).
It is really a book about love, about four different kinds of love. You
have a story about the love between two boys. There is the love of an
old man for a deceased partner and there is love between a mistress and
a very well-known person. There is a businesswoman who treats her lovers
as toys,” he explains and the timbre of his voice, the countenance on
his face leaves you wondering if there ever was a time in his life when
Onno van Gelder Jr., sent a bouquet of flowers, with certain colors and
arranged in a specific way, so someone special would smile and hold that
memory in their heart forever.
That being said the reasons he started writing provide an even more
compelling story. At the time he was young, it was mandatory for young
men to serve in the Belgian army for a minimum of eight months. During
his spare time, he began writing stories. He then put them away for
several years.
He explains, “Theater is something you see and then it is gone. You can
have pictures or video, but it is never the same as the experience of
theater when you are in the venue.
About the year 2016 I wanted something that I could touch, something
that I made myself, that I could touch, put it somewhere and look at it
ten years later and it would still be the same. I thought to myself, I’m
going to write a book. (he says that with a smile) That is how my first
collection of short stories (came to be). I thought I would write some
short stories to add to what I already had and then I will publish a
book. I will have something that in two hundred years people will say,
hey look at this it was written by Onno Van Gilder Jr. That was
something I could leave behind, because you can’t leave theater behind.
Onno van Gelder Jr. is gifted in so many ways, but in our correspondence
prior to our conversation and since, this writer has arrived at the
conclusion that his greatest gift is how he treats others and his
kindness.
#OnnoVanGelderJr #BelgiumAuthor #BelgianActor #DirectorBelgium #RivetingRiffs #RivetingRiffsMagazine #TeatroDirector #AutorEntrevista #ActorBelgica
|
It
is a Christmas story and most people think it is a story for children,
but no it is also for older people. 