Cas Enklaar (1943-2022) was a headstrong and characteristic actor
Cas Enklaar was a headstrong and imposing actor. He played with the legendary Werktheater, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, for small companies such as Nieuw-West and in films by Theo van Gogh.
He should have been in the garbage on stage in the Stadsschouwburg this spring, but Cas Enklaar had already been replaced by that other theater great: Gerardjan Rijnders. While it was such a wonderful role for the charismatic actor: sitting in a garbage can in Endgame by Samuel Beckett, directed by Erik Whien. But Enklaar was no longer fit enough to play in the reprise of the performance that was received jubilantly at the premiere in 2019. He passed away on Wednesday at the age of 79.
Enklaar was a boy from Den Helder who went to drama school ‘because he thought he had no emotions’. He asked his father for money. His father thought he needed money to see a psychiatrist because he was gayhe told in an interview in Theater newspaper. He was, but he needed that money for something else: to become an actor.
He ended up in the exciting theater circuit from the 1970s and participated in the most interesting companies in Amsterdam. Enklaar belonged to the club that started the Werktheater in 1970, together with Jan Joris Lamers, Peter Faber and Shireen Strooker, among others, and remained associated with it until 1985. That group broke with everything that had been theater until then. The collective departed from the theatres, had no director, and played in nursing homes, schools and hospitals. Their permanent home was at the Kattengat in Amsterdam.
As real as possible
The Werktheater makes performances about ordinary, real people, with recognizable emotions. Themes such as care for the dying, crime, aging and loneliness came on the stage very directly for the first time. Enklaar was a man who could do it in a penetrating, idiosyncratic and clear way. ‘You are always Cas when you play, you are never another’, actress Oda Spelbos told him. He could pursue the “realness of emotion,” critics wrote. It had a deep, sonorous stipe, one that was carried very far.
When he left the Werktheater, he joined Toneelgroep Baal and shortly afterwards transferred to Toneelgroep Amsterdam. He couldn’t find his place there, so he soon resigned to continue as a freelancer. He played regularly in the flat-floor theater circuit: with the avant-garde Nieuw-West, with Theatergroep Carrousel, but also in commercial commercial productions.
Enklaar was also part of film director Theo van Gogh’s permanent team, and played in, among other things, A day at the beach, after the book of the same name by Heere Heeresma, in which he plays the alcoholic Bernd. It was one of his finest film roles.
In 2008, Enklaar made an ode to the city in the form of a book: Houses and memories. A quest through more than 40 years of Amsterdam, in which he combined photos with stories about his nighttime adventures in the city. The boy from Den Helder never left Amsterdam.