Theo d'Or for Keja Klaasje Kwestro

Kwestro graduated from the School of Acting Arnhem in 2010. She received this highest accolade in Dutch theatre for her leading role in F*ck Lolita by Het Zuidelijk Toneel.

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The Theo d’Or Awards are presented annually at the Nederlands Theater Festival Gala in Amsterdam. Kwestro was nominated alongside Manoushka Zeegelaar Breeveld, Florian Myjer and Jatou Sumbunu. Her portrayal of Dolores in F*ck Lolita impressed the jury.

The way Kwestro approached the role brought together everything she had learned during her studies and career, as she told de Volkskrant:

It is the sum of twenty years of acting: freezing up at drama school, embracing experimentation during rehearsals and being given confidence at just the right moment.

For Kwestro, choosing drama school had seemed the obvious path throughout her childhood. As a child, she took theatre classes, and later attended the DNA preparatory programme in Amsterdam. At the age of 17, she was accepted into the acting programme in Arnhem.

During her first two years there, she was often told that she needed to learn how to “channel” her energy. 'I had a lot of energy, but I didn’t know how to use it properly. It lacked direction.'

In her second year, she took classes in text-based theatre with actress Christine Ewert. 'We worked on Antony and Cleopatra, a tragedy by Shakespeare, and had to memorise seventeen pages of dialogue, including a death scene. I remember that, during one class, she made me repeat the line ‘O sun, burn the great sphere thou mov’st in!’ over and over again, in all kinds of dramatic ways.'

'It was never quite right, and Christine would slap her hands against her stomach and say: ‘It has to come from here!’ It needed to be more convincing, to carry more weight, it was about life and death, after all! What did I know? I was 19, had enjoyed a happy childhood and had hardly any experiences to draw on.'

At the end of the course, Ewert said in her assessment: 'Look, Keja, without a cup, tea is just a puddle.' What she meant, Kwestro explains, was that acting needs form in order to communicate. 'Energetic acting only really gains meaning if, for example, it is suddenly followed by a moment of complete stillness. That is the teacup. I couldn’t do much with that advice at the time, but I have often thought back to it since.'

That lesson continued to serve her in F*ck Lolita. As Dolores, she races across the stage and through the audience in the stands, shouting and raging, but she also regularly grabs the audience’s attention with unexpectedly restrained acting. In the words of Sarah Moermans, director at Het Zuidelijk Toneel: 'Keja is becoming increasingly skilled at using that tremendous abandon consciously and strategically, rather than throwing it all down in one great heap.'