Acting the Maggot

Theater de Mythe is a cultural venue in the heart of Goes, the main town of the Zuid Beveland region in the Dutch province of Zeeland. The building has a long history as a place of public entertainment, opening in 1919 as a combined cinema and live performance hall. Through the 1920s, 1930s and into the postwar decades it served as the town's primary destination for film screenings, vaudeville shows and concerts. After a period of decline in the 1970s the municipality stepped in to preserve the building and reposition it as a general cultural centre, and a major refurbishment completed in 2015 brought the stage, acoustics and audience facilities up to modern standards. The result is an intimate venue with around 300 seats. The programming at De Mythe covers a broad range of disciplines, mixing live music with theatre, cabaret and community events. That breadth is central to what the venue is: rather than specialising in one genre or format, it functions as Goes's main stage for culture in a wider sense, drawing audiences from across Zeeland for evenings that might range from a singer songwriter set to a full theatrical production. The scale keeps things close and personal in a way that larger regional venues cannot, and the 2015 renovation made sure that intimacy now comes with solid technical infrastructure. For a town the size of Goes, De Mythe plays an outsized role as a gathering point for cultural life in this part of the province.