State of the Arts (1) Funding and government

This was Part One of a series for the Mail & Guardian.

The recent scandal surrounding South Africa’s participation in the Venice Biennale sets the scene for some hard questions that need to be asked about the arts in South Africa.

Not the usual questions of opaque decision making, lax administration, arbitrary planning, alleged corruption and nepotism, but bigger issues.

What is the role of government in art in South Africa? What value does our country and society place on art?

South Africa has been blessed disproportionately with spectacular talent, and yet on so many levels at home it remains a backwater. How do we explain this anomaly?

The reasons are political and economic.

Generally, there are two economic models that govern the arts. Where the arts are expected to recover their own costs, commercial work with little artistic merit often dominates. Where subsidy and government funding for the arts is generous, the arts often lapse into a different kind of mediocrity — that of self-indulgence and public insignificance.

Examples of both can be found in South Africa. Neither model should ever win the argument outright; a healthy tension should be maintained, but not one that strangles talent.

Unfortunately, South Africa’s mixed economy — an often nightmarish chimera of neo-liberal globalised capitalism and dirigiste, developmental state — has left the economy of the arts (and so much else in the country, such as the very energy of the economy — electricity) decommissioned, having fallen between these two stools.

Blind leading the blind

To put it simply, on the one hand the arts have been abandoned to the market economy; on the other hand, the present government funding model for the arts has many shortcomings.

On the political side, the biggest problem (in this critic’s view) is that with a few notable exceptions those in charge of the arts haven’t got a clue about the arts. Decisions are therefore based in ignorance. Other factors — ideological or personal connections — become instrumental.

The department of arts and culture (DAC) is often given over to sinecure positions and is a political dead end, whereas it should be vital and tied to the department of trade and industry and to foreign affairs, as happens elsewhere in the world.

The fact that there is no proper working relationship between the SABC and the DAC is bizarre and frankly scandalous despite the fine sentiments voiced by then Minister Pallo Jordan in 2007. Instead, the DAC’s annual report boastfully informs how it set up TV screens for the public to watch soccer.

Our arts bureaucrats are also well known for their junkets abroad where they “promote” South Africa, but are totally unproductive as far as I can establish. They tend to huddle instead of network.

The whole approach by government stems from the top-down legacy of the Mbeki years, which we still suffer under as a country, and not only in the arts.

Government favours “managers” who don’t know the industry. They waste their tenure flailing about trying to get up to speed. They hold absurd izimbizo where questions are not answered, advice never taken. Top management is also very unstable; the moment an official finally becomes known there is a change of guard to the next uninformed bureaucrat.

As one leading figure in the industry remarked, ask any of the top officials to name three South African playwrights or three of anything — leading artists, directors, choreographers, composers, dancers, fine artists — and they won’t be able to.

It is ironic then when government regularly expresses its immense pride in the international accolades achieved by South African artists it had never heard of before nor ever supported.

Unlike any other minister, the minister of arts and culture has only one job: to dole out cash to the best funding proposal writers, which one hastily adds are often a set apart from the best writers. He doesn’t have to set industry standards, license mineral rights, battle public sector unions, draw up educational curricula and so on. He dishes out money, or rather the promises of money.

The DAC seems to have now become a conservative heritage project, leaving funding for the active arts increasingly to the lottery to sort out, while scandalous decisions in the allocation of funds are par for the course at provincial level.

False starts, broken promises

Government should be concerned about “capacity building” and developing the industry, but as present structures stand, there doesn’t seem to be a natural fit between what the department ought to be doing and what it is set up to do.

It is bedevilled by too many reporting agencies, which have insufficient autonomy, and of which many are not core functions. Nor does it have the resources to service them properly (the department has a 28% vacancy rate). The result is a long list of dead end projects.

If it had any imagination, the DAC could be incentivising transformation; making interventions; leading with innovative policy; working with other departments to nurture and develop, deepen and enrich the arts; keeping those who have proved their worth afloat in difficult times.

The arts hold the potential to mop up large pools of educated but unemployed people prepared to work cheap. Almost nothing has been done on these fronts for 17 years. Now we have Mzansi’s Golden Economy plan for the arts on which the jury is still out.

In the DAC’s core activity of engaging in questionable expenditure and doling out money, it spends hundreds of millions on buildings (theatres, museums, etc) but with diminishing returns inside them.

A crucial body is the National Arts Council, which is meant to fund craft, theatre, dance, music, literature and the visual arts nationally has a piffling R49-million budget for this purpose (more is spent on Artscape in a year).

It is no exaggeration to say that for the vast majority of South African artists, the DAC is utterly irrelevant.

Communication with its constituency is poor. One common complaint is the loss of documents; I know of a recent case where a project had to resubmit its application file five times. The current minister may be suave and speak with elevated rhetoric, but that is not what people experience when attempting to engage with the department.

The timelines and budgeting are far too short for any serious projects, never mind for projects to engage with the world outside where international institutions plan four years in advance.

When funding finally does come through, the contract as one practitioner put it “isn’t worth the paper it is written on”. The DAC notoriously runs out of money. Nobody in their right mind is prepared to bridge finance on promissory letters from the DAC.

And what is the response of the arts community? They behave as if they are as powerless as babies.

July 14, 2012 | Comments Closed

State of the Arts (2) The Artists

This is Part Two of a three part series for the Mail & Guardian.

ny years ago, a state funding agency suggested to playwright Nadia Davids that her one-woman show about Muslim women, At Her Feet, was not representative enough to be funded, but would be reconsidered if she wrote in a few more characters of different ethnicity. She refused.

And the recent debacle over Brett Murray’s The Spear, whatever one’s take on the actual work might be, revealed how shallow is the understanding of the role of the artist in a multicultural society.

If there is one community that has always battled for “economic freedom”, it is artists; even if novelist Sinclair Lewis observed: “In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man.”

Artists must eternally struggle to create the material conditions in which they might actualise themselves, balancing their physical needs with their spiritual expression; their individual aesthetic sensibility with those of the broader public or their patron.

Under South Africa’s neoliberal dispensation, artists are largely left to the mercy of the markets. Where the state is involved, the market paradigm has “unintentionally” seen the vast majority of funds go directly or indirectly to centres and institutions that favour commercial work and spectacle.

Work that is deemed worthy of state patronage must tick either enough boxes (transformation, people with disabilities, doing workshops, raising awareness of social issues), or it must serve political ends. Perhaps it is only fair for artists who want the public purse to support them to accept this absurd criteria.

Tragic disinterest

Both the government and our corporate culture seem to view artists as entertainment to liven up events or express national pride. The artist must endlessly contest how he is seen by society.

So the artist is left struggling with these giant forces – the commercial imperatives of capitalism or the pressures for extraneous political correctness to gain the socialist subsidy.

Unlike their counterparts in the United States, by and large our wealthy citizens and sports-mad big business are tragically disinterested in artists.

But despite a feeling of genuine solidarity with the artist’s struggle, it is easy to feel irritated by this blubbing for the state tit. There is such a sense of entitlement. Artists who used to receive subsidies under apartheid, but who can’t even manage to raise an audience today, are outraged that their patronage has been withdrawn. Then there are emergent artists who have hardly proved themselves, who are borderline professional, but are demanding astounding subsidies and preposterous salaries. One wishes to say: Get on with it; prove your worth and relevance, and then ask for assistance.

I have made the point before in the M&G, that in the 1960s, Ben Masinga didn’t sit back for producer Ian Bernhardt and the Union Artists, but struck out on his own. Sam Mhangwane toured for 12 years with his own musical. Gibson Kente left Dorkay House and without subsidy and in the dark days of apartheid managed to sustain three touring companies in continuous employment through the 1970s paying his best actors handsomely.

Ironically, while these legendary entrepreneurs were running successful black theatre companies in the townships, the more ideological Black Consciousness theatre was funded from abroad and under white tutelage, and often performed overseas.

Was it because this work is less interesting to audiences and is rather sustained by political sensibilities? Is history poised to repeat itself?

Crisis point

At a recent congress of international theatre critics I attended in Europe, Professor Savas Patsalidis of Aristotle University spoke of how “theatre rediscovers its community at moments of crisis”.

Greece is convulsed by an unprecedented economic meltdown, and yet its artists continue. Athens will see 400 productions this season, even though most of the performers will not be paid.

“Some take it as a challenge,” says Patsalidis. “Others as a mission or vocation; others because they have nothing else or better to do … They want to re-establish their links with the community, its politics, its environment and the spectators’ experiences.”

The Athenians have come up with a host of performance interventions, such as theatre equivalents of flash mobs, theatre on public transport, in private living rooms and abandoned offices; even staging performances as part of the ongoing riots and protests in the streets.

Is South Africa not also a society to some extent in social crisis, still recovering from the shockwaves of the fall of apartheid?

Last month, one Cape Town-based company, The Mechanicals, set an example. They staged a full production of King Lear, possibly the most interesting the city has ever seen, under the superb direction of Guy de Lancey, with a cast of 15, including actors of such calibre as Graham Weir and Jeroen Kranenburg. They often rehearsed with parts being read as actors were absent, busy with paying jobs elsewhere; they lost some people along the way.

But in the end, they pulled it off, with everyone working not for financial reward, but for the love of the theatre and a belief in their art. They were out there doing their job.

“Form a union,” was the advice Pallo Jordan gave artists when he was minister of arts and culture.

But certain arts institutions, such as philharmonic orchestras, and opera and ballet companies, cannot hope to survive even for a day without private or public sponsorship.

A lost opportunity

And opera companies are now in revolt. Seven of them from across the country have banded together as a unified voice (the South African National Opera Association) against what they say is “the National Arts Council’s arbitrary decision not to award any company funding for 2012/2013, without notification”.

And there seems to be a grave lack of appreciation for just how employment intensive an industry is the arts. Cape Town Opera (CTO) left for the UK last week to give 38 performances over seven weeks in six cities.

The tour will bring in R2.9-million of the overall R14.7-million in remuneration paid to South African artists by the company in 2012.

The CTO is “currently negotiating 13 offers for tours over the next two years which would generate +R20-million in remuneration … but our application last year to the DTI Jobs Fund to expand our touring capacity, and to fulfil this kind of demand, was denied,” Elise Brunelle, CTO’s financial manager, wrote in an email to me.

One could argue that the way forward for the artists of South Africa is to lobby and to stand together; two things artists have historically never been very good at. The Creative Workers’ Union of South Africa did manage to kick up a fuss when local artists were initially excluded from the 2010 Fifa World Cup opening ceremony. They have hardly been heard of again.

The government and the private sector are big on lip service and acknowledging the artists’ importance in the abstract, but have to date overall dismally failed to respond to this constituency.

Mike van Graan, playwright and veteran activist in the arts, summarises this uphill battle: “The divisions within the arts community – principally, highly skilled and resourced Afrikaans practitioners and audiences on the one hand and ‘the rest’ on the other – represents a failure of vision, imagination and strategic management as the ‘haves’ in terms of skills, resources and expertise have got richer and the have-nots have generally been left to scrap over what public funding is made available; a huge opportunity to utilise the skills, expertise, resources across the country has been lost through political short sightedness and an absence of vision.”

Both struggle and struggling artists have been left out in the cold. Who knows what talent the country is allowing to wither away.

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State of the Arts (3): The Audience

Part Three of a three part series that first appeared in the Mail & Guardian:

As Hollywood and Broadway star Tallulah Bankhead said, “If you really want to help the theatre, don’t be an actress, darling. Be an audience.”

In the week of the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown one should state the obvious: Without audiences there is no theatre. And in the South African context that means an audience that is not only wrinkled, balding, wealthy and white-skinned.

Educating the elite is of course in itself a worthy pursuit. Theatre-makers who are obsessed with appealing to the young and complain that their audience is not rainbow-coloured enough ought to be more respectful of the theatre audience they do get and grateful for its loyal patronage.

Most of the traditional theatre audience of South Africa, however, has emigrated. Today, they fill the shows of touring South African performers in London, Perth and Toronto.

For many of us the origin of our theatre habits date back to our schooldays, to that magical night we were first introduced to the stage, usually thanks to committed teachers working after hours for free. This is where transformation needs to start.

It is not surprising given our history of segregation that theatre remains largely a whites-only pastime, often dangerously close to becoming a museum art.

After decades of rigid, petty apartheid, in March 1978, South African theatres were opened to all races. Cinemas however remained segregated; theatre being deemed so peripheral by the apartheid authorities it wasn’t worth segregating. In practice of course, people of colour were not made to feel welcome in state theatres.

The obstacles to audience transformation are well known. Physically, theatres are not located near the people and there is a lack of public transport, especially in the evenings, hence various audience development programmes to bus in “the people”.

Economically, theatre is perceived as relatively expensive. It is a paid, ephemeral experience; you don’t come out with a CD, a book in hand, a full tummy or less sober than when you went in.

Audiences are however notably absent even when theatre is presented free of charge. This may be in part due to an absence of familiarity, but there is perhaps a countervailing cultural aspect. Sitting silently in uniform rows in the dark is culturally peculiar.

We know that Shakespeare’s audiences in Elizabethan England were much rowdier than they are today. African audiences are voluble and like to interact. The more dependent the work is therefore upon the fourth wall of Western theatre convention, a play by Edward Albee or Harold Pinter for example, the less likely it is to succeed if there are disruptions from the auditorium.

And vice versa: theatre existed in Africa long before there were theatre buildings; the proscenium arch and the very format of commoditised Western theatre can prejudice an experience of African story telling.

It was therefore intriguing when two years ago Sir Ian McKellen and a British cast from the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London took to the makeshift stage of the OR Tambo Sports Centre in Khayelitsha, to perform that notoriously difficult play that so many European audiences have struggled to get their heads around, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

The evening was punctuated with applause and laughter. There were gasps when Lucky entered with a rope around his neck; protests when he obediently held Pozzo’s whip in his mouth – the subjugated complicit in his oppression. Loud chuckles erupted when McKellen, better known as Gandalf the Grey, gnawed on discarded chicken bones picked up off the floor. When Pozzo demands of the homeless men: “Waiting? … Here? On my land?”; the political dimension of the play was piercing. Near the conclusion of Act 1, a follow-spotlight falling on the two tramps had someone in the audience shout, “Ooh! Police!” The performance ended to whistles, cheers, and synchronised clapping.

This audience knew all too well the endless agony of waiting for a better life.

Western practitioners have a tendency to infantilise the African audience – “Oh how sweet! How lively! They respond like children.” I would rather argue that it is the Western audience who choose to act like well-behaved children at storytime, to enter the world of make-believe around what is patently false.

During apartheid, you’d see white patrons often perplexed or wanting to shush the reactions of their fellow black patrons.

During performances of protest theatre when, on stage, a white Afrikaans policeman with a baton beat an old defenceless black man, the black patrons would howl with laughter. I’ve observed this countless times.

The reason is perhaps that the violence on stage is so unreal to people who have actually borne such beatings it becomes literally slapstick; the comedy of pain, like Charlie Chaplin, the tramp at the hands of police with truncheons.

And yet outrage will be elicited by other moments. I recall in the mid-1980s seeing a Rex Garner comedy at the Baxter in which a white man wipes his hand after shaking it with a Xhosa man. He drew boos and hisses from black members of the audience.

Theatre audiences will change when black patrons take ownership of the country’s theatre spaces. It is not merely a question of the work that is presented in the theatre, but the building itself. Our old apartheid cultural bunkers are aloof, intimidating, alienating; still somehow tainted by the past. Last month, Soweto became the first township to get its own state of the art theatre.

At the opening night of Winnie the Opera at the State Theatre in Pretoria last year, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela spoke from the stage after the performance. The former deputy minister for arts and culture said it was her first time inside the State Theatre. She was reminded how the building was one of those difficult to bomb.

A combination of the legacy of the past and changing times means our theatre-makers have no choice, they need to take theatre to the people, and that may well be outside of the beloved theatre building.

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Interview with Nik Rabinowitz

Nik Rabinowitz

A shorter version of this interview ran in the Mail & Guardian on 9 December 2011.

Interview with Nik Rabinowitz
Brent Meersman

Brent Meersman: Has Jewish comedy affected you?

Nik Rabinowitz: My Godfather was a comedian and he was also a Jewish. He was actually more of an actor, but he was a big joke teller and collector of jokes, many of which were Jewish jokes. I think it is about being an outsider, whether you’re Jewish or black or a woman or whatever – a gay Moslem. Jewish comedy goes back centuries, dealing with oppression and difficult circumstances.

BM: A survival mechanism?

NR: Perhaps it was, and in our current economic and political climate there is a lot that gets people down, so the role of comedians appears to be important right now.

BM: Jewish humour is also often self-deprecating.

NR: Can you prove you Jewish? Yes, ask me for a loan (laughs). I think that my Jewish comedy mirrors my own discovery of my Jewishness, because I went to a Waldorf school; it was a Christian environment . . . Until I was 11, I didn’t know anything about being Jewish. Suddenly I was thrown into cheider for six year olds and I was 12 – Gulliver’s Travels for Jews. You have this Bar Mitzvah and all this Jewishness descends on you. . . I didn’t really know how to speak about it in my comedy. Now in this show [Stand and Deliver] I talk of the new wave of Judaism which is black Jews, Afrikaans Jews, and coloured Jews. In this show I also talk about death for three minutes. Funny shit happens when people die. It took me a while to work it out, how to do it in stand-up.

BM: Why do you want to make people laugh?

NR: Humour is a good way of bringing people together. There is something transformative about people laughing for that amount of time. It’s a healing of sorts. Cathartic.

BM: In the way crying or laughing are almost the same?

NR: They often look [the same]. I have a friend who I sometimes can’t tell the difference, especially on the phone.

BM: You do a lot of political comedy. If you look at Bill Maher in the USA, Have I Got News For You on BBC TV and the News Quiz on BBC Radio, we’re not doing very well are we with political comedy?

NR: If you compare us to the USA or UK yes. But [not] if you compare us to Australia! Going and performing there was interesting because I went to see a fair amount of comedy – nothing political. The Late Nite News show [with Loyiso Gola on ETV] is trying, but it’s not as controversial as a puppet that looks like the president.

BM: How does political comedy work for you?

NR: The discipline of doing a weekly radio show [The week that wasn’t on Cape Talk / Radio 702] has made me a better comic. And the more I can say stuff to which people say ‘they are going to put a hit out on you’, the better. The [radio show creates the] building blocks of my stage show. . . Connecting the political to the personal I think is interesting.

BM: But what makes politics funny?

NR: John Cleese was talking about the tension around taboo topics – how the laugh is often in proportion to the tension. Laughter is a natural reaction.

BM: And humour is transgressive.

NR: Yes. It’s an amazing time to be a comic in this country, just the abundance of material! ZANews is a release for the tension we build up. We need that to be mainstream [ZANews is internet streamed]. I watch television news but I’m always looking at it from this [show material] perspective. I want it to be as fucked up as possible. [But] the other night, afterwards I felt anxious, distressed and oh my god where is the country going. Laughter defuses it, makes it palatable and we can laugh about it.

BM: What comedy do you like doing most?

NR: I’ve done a lot of stuff for the Jewish community. . . . I think intimate comedy clubs are the most exciting; when I’m doing something I haven’t done before and I have no idea if it will work and then it kills. And it kills me too. That is exciting. With corporates you do what you know works; people aren’t going to go with you on interesting tangents.

BM: I always disliked your braai cook, Jannie Olivier, the kaalgat kok, “master baster” sketch.

NR: Yes, I remember you wrote that. I don’t do characters anymore. I did it because I saw other people doing it. The only character I really enjoyed doing was the black kugel. I find it breaks my momentum and rhythm with the stand-up.

BM: Characters can also trap one into having to do them every time, creating an audience expectation.

NR: (Nodding) The Jewish-Xhosa persona I have created, I can find myself trapped in too.

BM: What are the tensions in this Jewish-Xhosa combo? It is just bizarrely unique or are their affinities, contradictions?

NR: It was a gimmick. I always wanted to say the Jewish-speaking Xhosa guy, but people would think it was a mistake on the press release. I use circumcision for one thing. But the interesting tension is between Jew and Moslem at the moment. But where is the comedy? I find myself in a position because I see how everyone feels about it – my mother in law who lost most of her family in the Holocaust, how she sees Israel . . . but I also appreciate my Moslem friends’ views, and [then] there’s the SA connection. I saw this thing on Carte Blanche with Afrikaans Jews living in Israel – the boere Afrikaans stereotype farmer interviewed and the racism was: “I had 195 sheep and ‘they’ steal ten a week, and it used to be the . . . and now its them”. He talks to his dog in Afrikaans; it used to bark at the blacks but now the Ethiopians are Jewish and he has to re-educate the dog. “And that Tractor over there is financed by the WesBank. Ha ha! Get it?”

BM: We live among a politically conservative Jewish community. Are you prepared to go there [Palestine issues] with your comedy?

NR: I’m often tempted to when I get riled up by stuff, but my wife is a sobering influence. What is it going to achieve if I start to rant? There are people in my own family; am I going to shift anyone’s attitudes? It’s about finding a way to say stuff. [Israel] lends itself to our own conversation about land and in this city too . . . I do this piece, coloured people converting [to Judaism] to get into gated communities in Sea Point.

BM: What does the private Nik do?

NR: This world that I operate in is quite full-on; being in front of people a lot and having to be funny all the time. One of my favourite places in the world is in the Cederberg mountains. My dad spent about 20 years documenting rock art. As a kid I grew up camping and visiting these amazing places. There is one magical spot in particular, way off the beaten track, and I like to go there and spend a week just camping out on my own. We [comedians] are observers; we need that time.

BM: What was your first job?

NR: I worked as a river guide on the Breede and later the Orange. I was a handlanger. I used to [have to] carry everything on the boat – the portable toilet and a bag of shit. I’d carry people’s shit for four days on the Orange River.

BM: Have you been booed on stage?

NR: Once I was told to get off the stage or words to that effect: ‘You’re not funny!’ When I started I had this black Zimbabwean character I used to do for my entire set. Then I realised I had to stop doing that and start being Nik . . . I stayed over at Hanover and met Mark Banks at the bar and bought his CD. That was the first stand-up comedy I’d ever listened to, and South African, and it was so funny I drove to Johannesburg all the way with it playing.

BM: What were your first theatre experiences?

NR: I was a handlanger for Nicholas Ellenbogen and Theatre for Africa. We drove around Africa and I did the lights and tents and I dug a long drop in Swaziland. I got malaria. . . Before stand-up I did corporate theatre. I did something for Coca Cola in Nigeria; I wrote this little show, the history of Coke in 15 minutes, but after 7 minutes they came to us and said, “Please can you stop. We are eating now”. On a makeshift stage next to a pool all the way to Nigeria to do that!

BM: Is there any question you wished interviewers would ask you but they never have?

NR: How did I meet my wife.

January 2, 2012 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

A Number

Photo: Jesee Kramer

Interview with director Jonathan Munby and actors Timothy West and Samuel West for Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town. This article originally ran in the Mail & Guardian of 7 October 2011.

A Number at the Fugard Theatre
Brent Meersman talks to director Jonathan Munby and actors Timothy and Samuel West.

It is increasingly self-evident that the Earth has entered the epoch of the anthropocene, an age in which the impact of a single species, our own, is transforming the planet. Our enormous impact ranges from climate change to the remodelling of vast areas of the surface of the Earth. Today, we talk not only of the threat of global warming, but hubristically of climate engineering.

As population grows exponentially and with it mankind’s knowledge and understanding of the sciences, humans are rapidly developing the ability to alter, manipulate and create life. This biological revolution together with nanotechnology will vastly dwarf the industrial revolution that created the modern world.

Dolly the Sheep was cloned 15 years ago. The human genome has since been sequenced. Chimeras (such as a geep –a fusion of sheep and goat) and artificial life with synthetic DNA have been engineered. Scientists even modified a human embryo to fluoresce in the dark. It was destroyed. Had it lived that person would have been luminous.

Ever since the creation of the first atomic bomb more than half a century ago, man’s philosophical discourse, our ethical and moral understanding, and with it the legal and emotional implications the new sciences have for us as individuals, has been lagging far behind. We barely keep pace with the sociological implications of such new communication tools as Facebook and Twitter.

These psychological consequences for humanity in this brave new world are the subject of A Number by renowned British playwright Caryl Churchill. Written in 2002, it deals with a father (Salter) and his three sons, Bernard (B1), Bernard (B2) and Michael Black, two of whom are clones.

The play has its South African premier at the Fugard Theatre’s studio space in Cape Town with a highly acclaimed UK production.

“The space was once a church, and here they are doing a play about man who has played god,” says director Jonathan Munby.

Taking the roles of the father and sons are real life father and son Timothy and Samuel West. Both actors are well known to local audiences from their too-numerous-to-list film and television performances. For his sins, Timothy West played PW Botha in Endgame (2009).

Samuel West ventures that “with the death of Harold Pinter” Churchill is arguably the UK’s greatest dramatist. “She’s an unassuming goddess of theatre . . . I think it is [because of] her incredible use of form as well as content. She is very easily bored by the plays that she has already done . . . When she has a great success with something she is never tempted to go back to it. This play in particular [A Number] gets the marriage of form and content particularly well because of it casting three people in one.”

Timothy West adds she is “very elusive to pin down as a stylist . . . Her extraordinary use of dramatic text in a very unfamiliar way, yet it has a searing realism about it. It is frightfully difficult to learn.” He laughs. “She’s declared war on punctuation.”

“There is nobody like her [presently],” adds Munby, “a writer who experiments and is brave enough to reinvent themselves every time.”

Having a real life father and son “opens up the humanity of the play” according to Munby.

“It means we can get to the truth of what this relationship is immediately. . . it gets to the heart of it. When we started rehearsals, it was like starting in week five rather than week one.”

“I do think what it would be like to do this play with someone who wasn’t your dad,” muses Samuel West. “I’ve spent 45 years being his son and if it wasn’t [so] I’d have five weeks of rehearsal to pretend to be.”

The Wests laugh. “It certainly hasn’t drawn us apart!”

Munby adds: “The audience has a thrilling relationship with it as a piece of theatre. Of course they’re inside the drama and the characters but they’re engaging on another level with a real life father and son and seeing the similarities between them, not just physical. There’s that dialogue going on as well. . . The resonance of when Tim’s character says, ‘and I loved you’ − the resonance hits ten times deeper than if it were just two actors.”

“You get a nice laugh,” says Samuel West, “when he [Salter] says ‘just wait because I’m your father’, and another one when I say ‘you know that’”.

Reviving the play from their first run with it in 2006 has also brought new insights. And touring to South Africa means “the piece will change inevitably because there is a different audience,” says Munby. “The debate about identity in South Africa is going to be a completely different conversation from the one we had in London.”

Samuel West adds: “As you get further away from the idea of cloning [which is not particularly topical in South Africa], the play becomes less of a hot topic; cloning is the cause of the play but it is less interested in the science as a subject of drama”.

Munby says: “Churchill is more interested in the humanity and the relationships than the ethics of the sciences. She presents much more a debate about nature and nurture, about what makes us us. . . . I don’t think she is interested in the ethics of is cloning right or wrong.”

Timothy West comments that “there is officially never been an example of human cloning – that we know of – though we suspect there might be, but we know it is theoretically possible.”

A Number runs at the Fugard Theatre until October 29.

October 7, 2011 | Comments Closed

Winnie the Opera

Interview with Brent Meersman for the BBC World Service on Winnie the Opera
Listen to broadcast click here

June 28, 2011 | Comments Closed

Broken Glass by Arthur Miller at the Fugard Theatre

Photo: Jesse Kramer


In a sense life paralyzes all of us. Our incessant exposure to the horrors filling television and internet screens leaves us feeling hopeless in the face of gratuitous cruelty and galling injustice on a global scale.
Broken Glass (1994), written by Arthur Miller when he was 78, is set in Brooklyn in November 1938. News of the persecution of the Jews in Germany and specifically the events of Kristallnacht, from which the play takes its title, when Jewish shops were looted and synagogues ransacked during a Nazi instigated rampage, has made the New York Times.

Sylvia Gellburg (Susan Danford) is obsessed with the news. Sylvia suffers from hysterical paralysis of her lower limbs, apparently brought on by her distress at events in Europe; this in an era when the stigma and prejudice surrounding mental disorders was pervasive. Danford is an incandescent mix of delicate vulnerability and commanding personality. She may be bedridden or wheelchair bound, but her dramatic presence seems to have the free range of the stage; it is the audience who find themselves riveted, immobilised by her flashes of passion.

Miller briefly flirts with the conceit that perhaps Sylvia’s response is the sane one, and those going about their business trying to remain unaffected by the atrocities abroad – one easily forgets how strong America isolationism was at the time – are in some sense sick.

Her husband, Phillip (Antony Sher) is filled with self-loathing. He even goes as far as to insinuate that perhaps the Jews have provoked their harassment: “It’s no excuse for what’s happening over there, but German Jews can be pretty . . . you know . . . [stuck up].”

Above all, Phillip doesn’t want to be dragged back by reminders of his people’s suffering.
He is proud to be “the only Jew ever worked for Brooklyn guarantee”; “the only Jew [who] ever set foot on that deck [of his boss’s yacht]”. Phillip has patriotic aspirations and Republican values. He has foisted a military career on his son, Jerome: “he could be the first Jewish general”.

When ingratiating himself with his boss, the Ivy League Stanton Case (Patrick Lyster) who facilitated Jerome’s career, but who talks about “you people”, Philip transforms into the fawning Jewish stereotype he so hates.

Sher’s goal is to have Phillip become not only what he hates, but also what hates him – hence his black clothes and more than a gestural nod suggestive of the Führer. Sher brilliantly harnesses the force of both prototypes.

“That’s one miserable little pisser”, as Margaret Hyman (Anthea Thompson), the wife of the physician on the case, sums him up. “I like to talk and I like to laugh,” she says. Thompson is completely at home as Margaret, the comic relief.

Phillip suffers his own manifestation of psychosomatic paralysis – erectile dysfunction and impotence. Perhaps, the play keeps hinting rather crudely, this is the root cause of Sylvia’s condition.
Sher inhabits his nasal, whining character absolutely. Most powerful are his artful silences. His personal commitment to the part is obvious. In an interview two years ago, Sher told me how, when he first moved to the United Kingdom, for many years he tried to deny his own identity – a gay, Jewish, South African: “The classical actors . . . were all such tall, handsome, essentially British men, whereas I was this little Jewish whelp from Sea Point”.

Broken Glass is at its heart about denial in its many forms and disguises. In relationships, denial leads to personal failure and the resulting regrets turn to recriminations. Sylvia’s paralysis catches Phillip wrong-footed. The marriage shatters like a Jewish shop window in Berlin.

The doctor called in to diagnose and treat Sylvia, Harry Hyman (Stephen Jennings), only precipitates the crisis as unprofessional feelings develop between him and Sylvia. It is good to see Jennings (who is married to Danford in real life) on stage again, and he certainly has his work cut out for him. Hyman is an awkward part. Miller uses him alternatively as a foil for Sylvia and Phillip.

This is true too for Syliva’s younger sister, Harriet (Claire Berlein), whose function it seems is chiefly explication, providing background and off-stage information to sustain Miller’s argument and plot.
Miller is at his best when his characters enter that deeply ironical position of people who surrender their own desires and instead allow their better selves to protect their nearest by disregarding the truth.

The ultimately fatal blow dealt Phillip is when aspersions are thrown on his loyalty to the firm and he loses the confidence and approval of his employer. His heart is now literally broken. Phillip realises he has been used all these years and remains as much an outsider as ever: “You got some lousy rotten job to do” like “close down a business” or “throw someone out of their home”, then “send in the Yid”.

Powerfully worded as the text is, it is governed more by reason that intuition. You can hear the logic of the arguments Miller is peeling open, sometimes to the point of forcing his characters.

Director Janice Honeyman has paced the production well, which is a challenge given Miller’s eleven scene changes, each of which is introduced by a lone cellist, specified in the text, presumably to represent Sylvia’s soul-filled tristesse, but which becomes a means of brooding presentation growing gradually more intrusive.

Dicky Longhurst’s set, suggesting shards of glass, is chilling, if a bit too obvious.
Appallingly, anti-Semitism never seems to go completely out of fashion, whether it’s buffoons like Charlie Sheen (who recently tweeted that his manager was a “Jew pig”), John Galliano and Mel Gibson, or politicians like Mugabe and Ahmadinejad. The play gives no glib proscriptions, except to suggest that hope must rely ultimately on compassion.

April 17, 2011 | Comments Closed

Interview with Lara Foot, CEO of the Baxter

Lara Foot, the new CEO of the Baxter, one year into the job, speaks her mind, including her views on what is needed in funding in the arts in South Africa

Inevitably, a fair bit of anxiety and some excitement attend the change of guard at any major institution. The appointment of Lara Foot as the new Chief Executive Officer of the Baxter Theatre Complex was greeted with sighs of relief by many in the Cape Town arts community. Ms Foot had after all been the resident director and dramaturge of the Baxter between 2005 and 2007.

Foot is respected by her peers as a theatre-maker; she undertook a mentoring process with Sir Peter Hall; she has won all the coveted South African awards in her field, from the Fleur du cap Outstanding Young Director award in 1992 to the Standard Bank’s Young Artist for Theatre in 1995, and over the years, the Vita and various Fleur du Cap and Naledi awards.

As CEO, she is known to be both forceful and outspoken. Running a theatre establishment in these times is not for the meek. It is a constant struggle to overcome the seemingly intractable problems that beset the arts. The list of ailments is daunting; to name a few: stymied transformation, declining audiences, rising costs, undependable grants, frail sponsorships.

Foot says her job will “always be about funding because we’re not subsidized by government”. The Baxter, arguably long the country’s most vibrant (certainly busiest) theatre, is a cornerstone of South African performing arts.

Unfortunately, despite the Baxter’s reputation and international standing, favourably comparable to the Market Theatre during apartheid (from its inception 33 years ago the Baxter followed a non–racial policy), when South Africa became a democracy, it was left out of the nine theatres the state adopted.

The Baxter has been bolstered all these years by endowment money. However, successive years of deficit, prior to Foot taking office, have drawn down the available funds.

Funding the Baxter has now become a serious issue. Foot is still seeking additional funds of R2.6 million for 2010, and has started to lobby to make up for a projected shortfall in the current year.

“What people don’t realize is that the Baxter is not subsidized.” Foot relates how she received a letter of complaint that remarked “ . . . with all the subsidy you get”.

There is also a widespread public misconception that the Baxter is supported by the University of Cape Town.

“The university is incredibly helpful in terms of administration and governance and human resources; invaluable, and they give us [R]1.3 million towards operating costs.” She adds, “But we are not a drama school theatre . . . Why should the university be funding arts and culture in Cape Town? It’s not their job.”

According to the most recent available figures, government money accounts for less than 1.5% of total income, and nearly all of that is earmarked for specific projects.

“All I’m lobbying for is R3 million,” says Foot.

No theatre complex in the world of the Baxter’s nature and size (three formal venues with a combined seating of 1453) can exist without significant subsidy.

According to Artscape’s 2010 annual report, it received R35.5 million from the Department of Arts and Culture, R1.18 million from the National Lottery Distribution Fund, and a further R2.2 million from local and other tax funded bodies.

Arstcape is no doubt fulfilling its particular mandate, whatever one’s criticisms of the policy they are implementing may be, but there is something distressing about seeing a complex like the Baxter, one of the country’s most vital cultural arenas, receiving trifling governmental support, while state funded theatres have over the years steadily declined in the quality and the volume of work put on, even though their subsidies as a percentage of revenue steadily climb.

Foot believes that funding should be linked to “measurables”, such as number of productions and audience attendance.

The M&G listings for the past 7 years show clearly that all three venues at Artscape are regularly empty, some for weeks on end, except for random events. The complex seems to be a venue for just about anything nowadays – belly-dancing workshops, whimsical exhibitions, film screenings, awareness concerts, scores of amateur productions, beauty and body building competitions. And Artscape is a positively vibrant institution when compared to PACOFS (R27.8 million government grant) and the Natal Playhouse.

By contrast, the Baxter is almost always busy with professional theatre.

The difficulty is to continue to present work for loyal Baxter patrons while growing new audiences.

Over the past decade, what were previously very clear identities for its various venues – the theatre, studio, and concert hall, each known for staging quality work within a specific market – have loosened considerably as managements cast their nets ever wider for shows that will bring audiences.

Foot’s innovation has been the Flipside, staging work backstage in the main theatre.

“In a very short time we have had shows that have been more integrated and younger,” she explains. “Dramas too big for the studio and too small for the main theatre go to the Flipside”. The first tryouts (such as Magnet Theatre’s Inxeba lomphilisi) were well received. She admits that the venue was a bit cold to start and asks that I assure readers the venue is now adequately heated.

She would like to do more drama. Ideally, she wants to set up a young repertory company of 12 actors. That would need R2 million to operate plus production budgets.

“We are also going to have a new venue, an 80-seater downstairs where films used to be shown. That will be more accessible . . . more young people.”

“The Baxter is growing in terms of its number of productions every year. . . Last year we did 1250 presentations.” (Artscape did 759).

Amongst the country’s leading artists, the Baxter is certainly a sought-after venue.

The Baxter’s figures are impressive: 400 000 visitors, including 73000 school children and a special programme that brought in 7800 senior citizens.

“We’re in the brochures for tourism, we’re internationally known. If we were to disappear we would be sorely missed by the people of Cape Town and by the city and by the province . . . And where would all these [theatre, dance, musical] companies be performing?”

“Ideally the city and province should step in. . . and the public need to tell the city that they want their theatre.”

Last year, the city and province provided R400 000.

“Operating grants are the money that we spend to keep this building open”, without which there is no theatre.

The Baxter’s operating budget is pretty lean at only R11 million.

“Are we nurturing a society with a culture or an economy with a swamp?” asks Foot.

The problem as Foot sees it is that most officials responsible at ministerial and executive levels are totally out of touch, “unaware of what is vital to our culture”. They don’t even know “who the companies are that have made the greatest contributions”. She compares it to herself being asked to pick the national cricket team.

However, notes Foot, “I think that the new CEO of the National Arts Council , Annabell Lebethe is the most promising news we have had in a long time.”

As for the National Lottery Distribution Fund, it is “incredibly slow, unhelpful, even when you do go and see them on a personal level.”

Compared to many of our state theatres, an examination of the Baxter’s most recent annual report and financials reveals a well-run, tightly staffed organization with impeccable governance.

But Foot is not looking to government for a lifeline. She hopes that local business and individuals “will become part of the Baxter family . . . people who believe and want to invest in what we do.”

The Baxter is commencing a massive drive for private sponsorships. “I want to connect directly”, she says.

Foot can be e-mailed directly on: Lara.Newton@uct.ac.za

| Comments Closed

A real-life drama at the Fugard

Published in the Mail & Guardian, December 17.

It has been a fraught year for theatre in Cape Town. Late in November, the Fugard Theatre, which opened in February this year, expelled its resident repertory company, Isango Portobello, following what Eric Abraham, the theatre’s British benefactor, called “the discovery of certain financial irregularities”, formally suspending creative director Mark Dornford-May.

It was all very dramatic. Members of the troupe carried placards and toyi-toyied loudly outside. Videos of their protest were uploaded on YouTube.

London newspapers carried the story, with the Guardian running the headline: “All-black South African acting company evicted from theatre”, and the District Six Museum offering the performers temporary use of their Homecoming Centre.

The repertory company’s sole underwriter, Abraham, who likes to take the opportunities his patronage affords him to trumpet his activism in the 1970s, suddenly found himself on the receiving end of protest action.

In the heat of the moment, the acting company — headed by Dornford-May — issued a regrettable press statement likening their lockout to the forced removals from District Six under apartheid. The comparison is odious; this is a dispute about money.

It reflects a wider lack of sensitivity to South African history, and a willingness to exploit the legacy of the past, which has been a niggling hallmark of Isango Portobello since its inception.

Renewal of District Six
One night at the theatre, an elderly English patron on holiday remarked to me that he was stunned by the renewal and development in District Six. When he had last been “out here, it was all flattened”, he said.

He was one of many foreigners misled by the theatre’s marketing, which boasts that the theatre building is one “frequented by generations of District Six seamstresses and tailors”.

The Fugard has the original Congregational church hall in Caledon Street as its entrance, situated on the very periphery of what was District Six. The company and Dornford-May, who arrived in South Africa a few years ago, have no logical connection with that history.

The theatre has failed to build any significant relationship with coloured audiences — if anything, it has ignored them. In what is a smart but belated move, the theatre announced this week it will participate in the Suid-oosterfees next year, a major event on the local Cape cultural calendar.

When I spoke to Athol Fugard in February, then directing the world premiere of his play, The Train Driver, to launch the theatre that officially bears his name, he was uncomfortable with being an eponym. “I’m just going to call it the District Six theatre,” he told me.

It had taken the theatre’s then-executive director, Mannie Manim, months to persuade the playwright, who now lives in San Diego, California. Reportedly, he said: “I’m not dead yet.” As news of the protest action spread, someone in Vancouver tweeted, “Athol must be rolling in his grave”.

The visitors
At the gala opening in February, cabinet ministers and national politicians, such as Trevor Manuel (who is official patron of the Fugard Theatre) were present, but significantly not the Cape Town mayor or Western Cape premier.

What having Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe present at opening night is meant to achieve for the theatre troupe is hard to see. Several theatre luminaries from England were treated to the green room, while prominent Cape Town artists were left out in the foyer.

During the press tour given in January when the paint was still wet, Dornford-May repeated no less than three times that, with the exception of the Fugard play, the theatre would be performing only his company’s work.

Abraham and Manim (who unexpectedly resigned this week with immediate effect) seem to have had their own ideas — the theatre has staged work by other directors, including Sean Mathias, Marthinus Basson, Lara Bye and Pieter Dirk-Uys. Abraham put R18-million into creating the theatre, while Dornford-May worked with architect Shaun Adendorff on the design and supervised the construction.

Abraham is married to the Swedish Tetra Pak heiress, Sigrid Rausing, the daughter of Hans Rausing, whose estimated net worth of $10-billion places him as the 64th richest man in the world on the latest Forbes list. Sigrid Rausing’s charitable trust (which is not involved in the Fugard) has an annual philanthropic budget of £20-million and does some stunningly good work in the area of human rights.

Cultural commentator Sandile Memela wrote a letter to Business Day in February congratulating Abraham for having “finally launched the ‘home’ of black theatre”.

The 270-seat theatre is beautifully turned out, but, from its large communal dressing rooms to the small stage with only one entrance and no wing space, it is custom-built for Dornford-May’s ensemble work.

‘Street fighter’
Guest artists, including Sir Ian McKellen, who recently preformed at the theatre in Waiting for Godot, find themselves partitioned off by a curtain in the female dressing room. As stalwarts of the theatre, they don’t object, but it is a telling detail.

When speaking to people who knew Dornford-May in London, the phrase “street fighter” regularly crops up. His moodiness earned him the nickname Dark Mornford.

Members of Dornford-May’s previous South African theatre company, Dimpho Di Kopane (DDK), say the director changed radically during his tenure.

Andile Kosi, who was with the company from its inception (he now works for Boss Models) and is still very proud of the work he did there, says Dornford-May changed from an incredibly “generous” man who looked after them as though they were “fragile eggs” to someone who became increasingly authoritarian. If anyone questioned him they were summarily dismissed.

South Africa has been good to Dornford-May. He lives in a historic Cape Dutch manor house he has extensively renovated. He refers to his marriage to co-director and leading lady Pauline Malefane as a “mixed-race couple”.

They have children at elite private schools — a son at Bishops and a daughter at Herschel.

This is not the first time Dornford-May has been given a theatre home. When he arrived in South Africa from the Broomhill Opera, the Enthoven family of Spier, like Abraham, embraced him and gave him wholehearted commitment. Sources closely involved say tens of millions were spent on projects. Dornford-May has gumption and is able to sell people on his vision, one South Africa has been crying out for — a world-renowned black performance company.

Irregularities
Spier created a 200-seater venue at Lynedoch Eco Village. It opened on January 31 2006 as the repertory home for Dornford-May’s DDK company. In Dick Enthoven’s words at the time, it was part of the Spier Arts Trust’s dream to “enable the discovery and nurturing of new and exciting talent”. By June that year it was closed.

At the time, sources close to the events said financial irregularities in the form of unauthorised expenditure were the cause, but accountant Ralph Freese, who wound down the DDK company, says all the audits were passed.

The bad blood in DDK came to a head after the worldwide acclaim for their film, U-Carmen eKhayelitsha. Kosi says Dornford-May told them “we will all be rich”. The company went to welcome him at the airport on his triumphant return from the Berlin Film Awards. But despite its success, the promised financial returns did not materialise and deep unhappiness set in. One member asked why they could not melt down the Golden Bear statue the film had won and share that out among themselves.

The company’s trust in their director was irrevocably broken, despite him swearing to them on a Bible that there was no money to be had, says Kosi.

“We also had to buy our food from the canteen run by Pauline’s [Malefane] family,” a former DDK member says, “otherwise we would get looks.”

DDK made a second film, Son of Man, winner of the Festival Award for Best Feature at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles 2006. When members of the company asked who collected the prize and how much it was, Dornford-May “turned red”, says Kosi, who played Jesus in the film. Once again, there was no financial reward for the company.

Amid financial inquiries, first Malefane resigned, then shortly afterwards Dornford-May. The company tried to continue without him but its back had been broken. Spier was left to mop up the mess. Enthoven hired director Bonnie Rodenie to help the cast find new work.

Defence
Camilla Driver, formerly in a management position with DDK, says she wishes Dornford-May’s latest company, Isango Portobello, wasn’t dependent on a sole funder, but could have a diversity of backers to continue the work she describes as exceptional.

Dornford-May, after his initial reaction to their expulsion from the Fugard, went to ground and did not respond to attempts by the Mail & Guardian to reach him. Abraham has a reputation for being litigious.

“We would not have the support of people like District Six [Museum] if we were conmen,” Dornford-May volunteered to the Cape Times (November 24).

At the time of the DDK collapse, members of the troupe wrote to me in an email that “the whole DDK thing was a big fat lie and fake” and said Dornford-May is “a fat Englishman [who] made a lot of money out of exploiting their being black all over the world”.

“Huge amounts of money were spent to fly and put up English artists in hotels in South Africa”, while the cast were sent back to their homes in the township. “Where is Mark? In townships? No, hiding somewhere in his expensive house”.

This time, the company seems to be supporting Dornford-May in the spat with Abraham — not much thanks for a man who has sunk R30-million into them during the past four years.

When I met Abraham last week, he said he felt “betrayed”. There’s that excited energy about him that fighting words bring.

“An act of empowerment, affirmation and enabling became an expensive and cancerous growth of entitlement, opportunism and arrogance … I feel most sympathy for the cast. They were misled and manipulated by their management.” But, says Abraham, “some 60 performers have over the last four-and-a-half years of my support become professional … I am enormously proud and admiring of what they have achieved. This should not be forgotten. I regret that none of their productions was performed in their hometown of Khayelitsha.”

‘Not the best contribution’
Keeping a loss-making company of that size going indefinitely to indulge one director’s vision does not seem to be the best contribution that can be made to theatre. It would have been sufficient to fund the Baxter theatre with its many projects for 10 years, something Abraham makes plain he is sensitive to.

In the Cape Times in November, just days before Dornford-May’s latest production — the R600 000 The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists — flopped, he claimed that his company was a victim of a white audience mentality that thinks “that non-white theatre work is somehow inferior”.

That such attitudes exist is correct, but the problem here is much more likely to lie with the actual work. Local critics have never given Dornford-May the critical acclaim he desires. The Cape Times critic, Theresa Smith, described the latest production as “a history lesson”, and Biz Community’s Daphne Cooper left what she called “a worthy lecture” at interval.

As a theatre critic, I have always felt Dornford-May’s directorial vision doesn’t ring true for South African audiences; it is that of an outsider overshadowing the contributions of the actual talents involved. But the British press are won over by the insertion of causes célèbres such as HIV/Aids and what they describe (in the colonial and patronising terms we are accustomed to from them) as “greeted by tribal song and dance”, “an explosion of African colour” and praise for the “raw panache” of the performers.

I think Dornford-May is delusional about his contribution to black theatre. There were black opera singers and productions with large black casts before he arrived. It wasn’t a “radical” idea, as he asserts.

Foreign directors often pose as somehow coming to the rescue of destitute township artists whose “raw” talent they have mentored into international stardom. Dornford-May’s casts have often included professionals trained for several years by others who go unacknowledged when touring overseas as it doesn’t fit the rags-to-riches narrative he wants to tell.

According to the press release issued by the company on November 22, they have secured funding for the coming year for what is now called the Isango Ensemble. Well-placed sources say Dornford-May has found a new patron.

Manim said he would “pursue his career in the theatre as a producer and lighting designer on a freelance basis”. Daniel Galloway has been appointed in his place. If Abraham is able to keep the lights on at the Fugard, he will be making a valuable contribution to the country.

The Fugard, he says, “will honour its iconic location in District Six by finding ways to connect with the remaining members and descendants of this tragically displaced community”.

A season of Fugard plays is being planned to mark his 80th birthday in 2012. An Afrikaans version of his play, The Captain’s Tiger, translated by Antjie Krog, will open on January 19.

The debacle down at the Fugard makes for a sad story out of which none of the key players emerges unscathed. They have only themselves to blame. Hopefully all parties will continue to contribute to our cultural life having learned how vital integrity is at all levels for the artistic enterprise.

Meanwhile the New Space, launched with much goodwill in Long Street in December 2008, has closed. Benefactors who lent their names and made financial contributions to the NewSpace Trust, a public benefit organisation that was to run the theatre in the spirit of the legendary Space Theatre of the 1970s and 1980s, feel duped. The owners, Indigo Properties, have not accounted properly for what went wrong or why they reneged on this promise.

Trevor Manuel has subsequently resigned as patron of the Isango ensemble.

December 17, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Comments Closed

The Train Driver and Rustlers

I knew I had seen a play about it before. I vividly recall the final image – a giant light of a train bearing directly down on us in the audience. Since Athol Fugard’s The Train Driver was staged earlier this year, it has been driving me absolutely nuts for months now. I asked various people; nobody seemed to know. I hazily recalled it as a work by Geraldine Aron. Hunting through Aron’s plays on the internet I could not find anything that reminded me of that work. Perhaps I’d got the author wrong. I searched for keywords such as ‘play’, ‘train’, ‘suicide’, ‘South Africa’ and all that came up was the Fugard play and news reports on train jumpings.

Finally, I found time this weekend to rummage through my enormous collection of theatre programmes. And there I found it. Geraldine Aron’s Rustlers deals with the same incident as Fugard’s play, and Aron had also dedicated her play to “Phumla Lolwana and her children Lindani, Andile and Sisanda”. It was performed here at Artscape Theatre in March 2003. Diane Wilson lead the cast. Mystery solved.

September 6, 2010 | Tags: , , | Comments Closed
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