Marie Chaplet

Torpedo Theater is a small theatre in the centre of Amsterdam, at Sint Pieterspoortsteeg 33, with room for just thirty people in the audience. It was originally founded by Het Parool, the Dutch national newspaper, and that background in print has shaped its character ever since. From the beginning the theatre has been committed to the spoken, written and performed word, which makes it a different kind of stage from the larger concert halls and clubs nearby. The scale is the defining feature. With so few seats, performances here are close and unamplified in spirit, and the programme leans toward intimate concerts, text based work and experimental language. One long running example is playbill, an event based project curated by Martha Jager and Isabelle Sully, both connected to the Dutch Art Institute. It launched at the theatre with Act I, devoted to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and presents experimental language and text based artistic works on what the curators call the small stage, a nod to the theatre's history with print media. Later acts have taken up themes such as song, and the project runs an annual Open Stage evening that started in 2023 and gives a group of young practitioners the chance to propose work they feel belongs on this particular stage. One recent edition was a double bill weekend, the first for the series. The room also hosts storytelling of a more local kind. Visitors have written about it as a hidden gem, and it has been used for theatre performances about the history of Amsterdam, including a show that imagines a meeting between Anne Frank and Rembrandt. For concert goers, Torpedo Theater offers something rare in the city: a chance to hear music and words in a space where the performer is only a few steps from every seat.