The cast of Brant Theatre Workshops’ Herinnering gave residents a sneak peak of their play during the Tulips and Maples Festival in Brantford on Saturday, May 2, 2026.
While the outdoor play was set to make its debut over the weekend, all three showings were ultimately canceled due to cold weather.
In the meantime, those at the festival still had the opportunity to hear some of Will Veldhuis-Prinzen songs that are featured in the production.
Vincent Ball, a local playwright, said the play centres around the Dutch famine, widely known as the Hunger Winter, and the liberation of the Netherlands by Canadian soldiers in the mid 1940s.
“The play is called a Herinnering, which is the Dutch word for remembrance, or memory,” he said. “Peter Muir [Artistic Director for Brant Theatre Workshops] approached me about doing a play on the Canadian liberation of Holland and while we all know that story, a lot of people may not know about the Hunger Winter.”
“The play centres around a mother and father, parents, who want to teach their daughter about the Hunger Winter, so they arrange a special dinner for her. Of course, she thinks she’s going to The Oriental, maybe Stan’s Fries or Maria’s Pizza, but no, they’re going to be serving her tulip bulb soup,” Ball continued. “During the Hunger Winter, people would have had meals like tulip soup or tulip stew for sustenance because that’s how bad it was, and that’s what the play centres around. We took what the recipe might have been at that time and while the parents are making the meal, they’re talking about their wartime experiences and starting to share about other things too.”
The playwright went on to say that the production explores the realities of the times, touching on the onderduikers–those who went underground to hide from the Nazis–the Dutch resistance movement and those forced into labour camps.
“It’s a rather dark play because we’re talking about horrible things like deprivation,” Ball said. “But ultimately, the play is about resiliency, resourcefulness and generosity, and the fact that our countries now have this great bond. We really try to capture as much about the war as we possibly can because like I said, a lot of people know about the liberation of Holland, but they may not necessarily know about the Hunger Winter even though it was huge.”
He went on to say that much of the inspiration for the play came from stories and the people he’s written about in the past.
“The thing I enjoy most about this play is that it’s all based on local stories I did for the newspaper years ago. I had interviewed a Dutch couple years ago and that’s how I first heard about the Hunger Winter,” Ball explained. “The husband was telling me about a chocolate bar that landed at his feet. He had been starving so he grabbed it and ate it right away; that had happened years before our interview but it was a great moment he still remembered. And his wife, she had told me that she was feeling guilty for three days because she threw out a spoiled head of cabbage. She said that would have been a meal for at least two or three days and she felt bad because she allowed it to spoil.”
“Think about the generational trauma that starvation would have caused,” he continued. “You have a whole generation that was starved, and that has ramifications on the next generation and the next generation after that. It was just awful”
Noting that he had yet to see the play in its entirety, Ball said that he still got to see a glimpse of what he calls “theatre magic” while the actors were singing.
“When the Brant Theatre Workshops group take my words, and they do the actions I’m hoping they’ll do when they deliver a specific line, that’s what I call theatre magic,” he said with a smile. “We got to see some of that today and that’s what I’m really looking forward to seeing more of.”
To make up for the loss of the show’s viewings, Brant Theatre Workshops will be teaming up with the Canadian Military Heritage Museum to bring the production indoors in late May or early June.
“We had a rough weekend with the weather and we couldn’t deliver the whole performance for everybody,” said Ball. “We feel bad about that, but I really want to thank Bob Ion and the people of the Canadian Military Heritage Museum because they’re going to allow us to put it on inside. I hope the people that did come here and were disappointed that they weren’t able to see the play, will come back and see it then.”
The playwright also added that another version of the play will be mounted in October as part of the Immigrant Memories of Brantford Project. This year’s initiative focuses on the Dutch community that made Brantford home.
“What you’re going to get there is a little bit different too, because you’re going to get the theatre production, but you’re also going to get videotaped interviews of people who lived through it that will be sharing their memories,” he said.
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
