Micha Wertheim Festival: Mark Thomas (UK) - Mark Thomas

Micha Wertheim Festival

Micha on Mark Thomas: 'I have always maintained that theatre does not have the task of being an activist. Every time I see Mark Thomas perform, I realise that I am mistaken. I also saw Mark for the first time at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He is known as a comedian, but the performances I saw of him were more like journalistic monologues. The closing scene of his performance about the NHS (a film of three women waiting at the coffee machine to go to work despite all the budget cuts because they want to help patients) has always stayed with me. The people from the audience he invited onto the stage to sit at his table wearing a miner's mask inspired me to organise a similar kind of counterplay with people from the audience.

Mark is an old-school socialist who does not shy away from doing extensive research before creating a performance. He explicitly plays with and for the audience he wants to convince. He also created performances about the power of Coca-Cola and the infamous wall that Israel built.

It is a form of cabaret that I have rarely seen in the Netherlands and that I would like to show, if only to convince myself that I have been wrong all this time with my view that theatre should not be activist.'