With A View From the Bridge, American audiences were getting a taste of the European (state-funded) avant-garde. Van Hove is the perfect bridge between the two because he is multilingual and multicultural. (A native Flemish speaker from Belgium, he is now based in Dutch-speaking Amsterdam and works with actors in England, France, and Germany in their own languages.) He brings work steeped in the European tradition to U.S. audiences without demanding that they read foreign-language subtitles.

Working in English is, obviously, a huge advantage to anyone who wants to succeed in American commercial theater. London is a great source of future American transfers, such as the musical Matilda, developed with the Royal Shakespeare Company; Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, from the Royal Court Theatre; and Marianne Elliott’s version of Angels in America, which started at the National Theatre. All of those organizations receive funding from the British government. Sam Mendes’s production of The Lehman Trilogy, which opens on Broadway in March, is the product of three sets of European state subsidies. It began as a play on Italian public radio, was developed by state-supported theaters in France and Italy, and was translated into English by the National Theatre’s then–deputy artistic director Ben Power.

There is nothing wrong with the concept of public money, in the form of subsidies, being transformed into private profits, in the form of West End or Broadway box-office returns. Most theater makers I have met are proud of the internationalism of their profession. But the practice should be acknowledged, because it challenges mainstream opinions about the sluggishness of the state compared with the dynamism of the free market. As the economist Tyler Cowen noted in a report for the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts in 2004, there is a tendency to “paint a picture of one subsidized cultural sector and another entrepreneurial cultural sector.” But that is a false dichotomy: Whether any particular Van Hove blockbuster starts in a commercial or subsidized theater is irrelevant. The fact is that he would not exist as an artist without decades of nurturing by the ecosystem of European state support.

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“In reality, popular culture often draws upon nonprofit culture for its ‘research and development’ efforts (and to some extent vice versa),” Cowen wrote in his report. In the world of theater, one of the earliest and most famous examples is Les Misérables, whose English version was originally developed by the state-funded Royal Shakespeare Company. It is the longest-running musical in the West End and one of the most financially successful.

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own,” the Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has said. “You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.” The same principle applies in theater. The box-office receipts of commercial theater are not solely attributable to private entrepreneurs and fierce capitalist competition. As Van Hove’s career shows, the private sector feeds off of the state-funded one. In that way, the future of Broadway depends on the Dutch government, and its 17.5 million euros a year.