Hans Teeuwen: Echte Rancune

Netflix shipped the English rewrite before Dutch TV got the original.

Hans Teeuwen's seventh solo show is called Echte Rancune. The catalog title is Dutch. latestnetflix.com's take is that the version that circled the planet in 2017 is Real Rancour, the London rewrite Netflix posted on 1 July, months before a Dutch home recording existed.

That split is the story. Dutch cabaret still treats Teeuwen as local weather. Netflix treated him as an English special, 103 minutes, TV-MA, with TMDB listing Doesjka van Hoogdalem as director on this title. British critics reviewed the English hour. Dutch papers reviewed the Carré night.

Try-outs vanished. The stars stayed at three.

He announced the Dutch show on 19 January 2016. Try-out tickets for April and May sold out inside an hour. Theaterkrant watched him at Carré on 9 May and filed three stars. So did de Volkskrant, Trouw, and De Telegraaf. Theaterkrant said he was hunting a compromise between vulnerability and alienation, then missed the radical bite that made the 1990s work dangerous.

Britain was hungrier. The Times gave Real Rancour four stars and called him an idiosyncratic genius. At Soho Theatre, the Guardian's Brian Logan wrote that the set "demagnetises your moral compass." Teeuwen told the room their expectations were too low, then spent an hour on "confusing times." Logan's image for the method was a delinquent infant with a scalpel.

He had been off UK stages for six years, singing lounge songs. In a Guardian interview that September he refused the mellowing narrative. "Now is not the time to mellow. It's much more a time for a rebellion against political correctness." He added that he did not aim to please anyone anymore.

The rebellion had already made tabloid noise. During the 2016 fight over German comic Jan Böhmermann's Erdogan poem, Teeuwen went on Dutch television and claimed, with a straight face, to have known the Turkish president as a "boy whore" in an Istanbul brothel. The Guardian and Chortle both printed the bit. He later told British Comedy Guide he was never charged.

British rooms already knew the volatility. He won a Chortle Award in 2008. Dutch Wikipedia records a Latitude Festival booing in 2008 after an explicit sex sketch, then another walkout at Greenwich in 2009. Stewart Lee, writing in the FT, clocked the split crowd. "To be fair, half the room was just irritated." The other half included Dylan Moran, Russell Kane, Bridget Christie, Ruby Wax, and Bo Burnham.

The Dutch tape sat behind a paywall.

BNNVARA's VARAgids noted in July 2017 that the English Netflix tape beat the Dutch TV registration home. Cabaret site Zwartekat said the same week it was still unclear whether Echte rancune would follow onto the service. The later chronology is blunt. The Dutch edition first hit homes through Teeuwen's own Hans Teeuwen World platform in December 2017. RTL 4 finally ran it on 2 January 2019 for 476,000 viewers.

So the Netflix object and the Dutch object are twins, not clones. One is a Leicester Square recording, taped 25 and 26 November 2016, aimed at English-speaking countries plus the Netherlands and Belgium. The other is the seventh Dutch-language solo, the one Dutch papers three-starred, the one his own site sold first. If you came for Carré, check the language track.

The hour still does the Teeuwen things. Abrupt songs. Character work. A late stretch about a vicious review landing on his girlfriend and young daughter, which VARAgids said made some of the London crowd hold their laughs out of pity. He told Logan the Dutch version was "more accessible, a little less absurdist" than the old material, and that it even included a story that was almost 100 percent autobiographical, which felt weird to him.

Weird is the brand. Netflix just bought the English twin first.