Joan Nederlof (1962) is a Dutch actress and playwright/scenarist. She graduated in 1985 from Toneelschool Amsterdam and subsequently established theatre company Mugmetdegoudentand (‘Mug’), along with, among others, Marcel Musters. She has performed in many of the company’s productions, such as Lost in Hotel Paradise and Onder Controle, which was selected for the Dutch Theatre festival in 1995, thus crowning it as one of the best performances in the Netherlands that year.
Since 1997 she has been mainly writing for television. Together with director Peter Kramer, she created 36 episodes of drama series Hertenkamp, in which she also played a main character, Grace Keeley. Nederlof was personally awarded several prestigious national prizes for her performance in this series. This achievement was followed by creating and writing tv- series TV7 and up-to-date adventure series De Koekoeksclub. In 2005 she returned to the stage in a play she wrote herself, Brünnhilde 40+, which received much praise from both audiences and press alike. In 2006, she performed in the second play she wrote, Quality Time, which was selected for the Theatre Festival 2006.
In 2008, Nederlof was nominated for a gold ‘Notekraker’. This annual award honours the ‘most noticeable performance on stage in the Netherlands’. From 2007 to 2013, Nederlof participated in writing several productions for Mug. Additionally, she created several issues for the 3d, 4th and 5th season of popular tv series Gooische Vrouwen.
In 2014 Nederlof started working on a trio of solo performances, both written and performed by her, of which the first two, Sinaasappelstraat and De Eurocommissaris have now been staged. Since 2017, when she became artistic leader of Mugmetdegoudentand, she has also been working on a tv-series in eight episodes about a national newspaper, which will be produced for tv in 2019.
De Eurocommissaris
A few years ago, I realised I knew very little about the European Union. That struck me as strange considering the importance and power of Brussels. So I did some research and made a little show about the EU and a fictional Dutch European Commissioner. But I grasped that my monologue arose entirely from my Dutch point of view. Is a democratic Europe even possible, if, subconsciously, we remain so rabidly nationalistic? – Joan Nederlof (writer of De Eurocommissaris)
In De Eurocommissaris, a fictional European commissioner (Charlotte Hajenius) takes the audience on a humorous journey through her thoughts and tribulations. Is the dream of a democratic, united Europe even possible if Member States persistently put their own agenda first? Charlotte Hajenius gives the audience a glimpse into the inaccessible politics and conflicting values of Europe.
