The International Theater Amsterdam said on Wednesday that it had cut ties with Ivo van Hove, the Tony-winning director who led the company for more than 20 years. The breakup was announced just weeks after a report said that a “culture of fear” had developed under van Hove’s leadership and that he allowed bullying to go unchecked.
Although van Hove stepped down as the theater’s artistic director last year, he stayed on as a salaried artistic adviser and was scheduled to create new work. A news release this week said that those collaborations had been terminated, and that the theater’s entire supervisory board had resigned.
“By taking these steps and creating space for restoration and transparency, the interests and feelings of all involved are taken seriously,“ Clayde Menso, the International Theater Amsterdam’s managing director, said in a statement.
In July, the International Theater Amsterdam published an independent report that included the results of a survey of 285 current and former employees.
The report detailed incidents of bullying and intimidation, including an actress shouting at a member of the technical staff after an error, and a guest director acting similarly toward actors. Many of the survey’s respondents said they did not feel safe at the company.
Last week, the NRC newspaper published its own investigation into the theater’s backstage culture. In the article, an actress said a colleague had grabbed her by the throat.
A spokesman for van Hove said the director was declining all interview requests. In a brief written statement, van Hove said the decision to leave the theater was reached by “mutual agreement.”
Van Hove took over the theater in 2001 when it was known as the Toneelgroep. He turned it into one of Europe’s great theaters and toured its productions internationally, including to New York. In 2022, the theater’s adaptation of “A Little Life” played to rave reviews at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Van Hove’s own profile long outstripped the company’s. In 2016, he won a Tony Award for directing Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge,” and he was a nominee in 2019 for “Network” starring Bryan Cranston.
But some of van Hove’s recent shows did not live up to that earlier success. In February 2020, his revival of “West Side Story” opened to mixed reviews just weeks before the coronavirus pandemic shut down Broadway. (The musical never reopened.) This year, British critics savaged his “Opening Night” in London’s West End; its run ended more than two months early.
Since stepping down as the International Theater Amsterdam’s artistic director, van Hove has taken up the leadership of the Ruhrtriennale Festival of the Arts in northern Germany. His first edition began last Friday, with “I Want Absolute Beauty,” in which the actor Sandra Hüller performs songs by P.J. Harvey.
Accounts of problems in the theater began emerging last year, when Hélène Devos, an actress in the ensemble, wrote on Instagram that she was leaving the company because she had “witnessed and endured severe mental and physical abuse.” When she complained, Devos said, she “was aggressively pushed back.”
Devos did not respond to an interview request.
Hein Janssen, a longtime theater critic for de Volkskrant newspaper, said van Hove’s international success had played a part in the scandal. Because van Hove was working abroad so often, he could not oversee the company properly and appeared happy to let other staff members deal with the incidents, Janssen said. “The complaints were ignored,” he added.
Janssen said he was shocked to read in the report that star actors in the company had bullied and intimidated younger colleagues. Cutting ties with van Hove would not fix that, he said. He added that Eline Arbo, the theater’s current artistic director, should focus on fixing the culture in Amsterdam rather than working abroad.
Marijn Lems, a theater critic at NRC, said that he did not expect the scandal would have an impact on van Hove’s international standing. But, he added, it had seriously dented the director’s image in the Netherlands.
“The major theaters won’t want anything to do with him,” Lems said.
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