Abey Xakwe as the guide in Orfeus
Orfeus is in many ways a departure from Bailey’s previous ‘plays of miracle and wonder’, like IPI ZOMBI? and particularly iMUMBO JUMBO, both characterised by ritual and ceremony, and a dramatic plot that builds towards an apocalyptic climax sweeping the audience with it. These works were aggressive – about fire, blood and bone. Bailey broke down our defences with drums, screams, knives and broken glass. Possessed, we joined the Bacchae. You left his theatre charged up by the adrenalin of the experience, renewed through catharsis, liberated by the irrational.
In Orfeus, Bailey searches out softer tissue, our vulnerabilities, the marrow in our bones, the chasms in our souls. He uses our sympathies for the blind, the crippled, the broken and the voiceless to torture us. We engage with nature and the beauty of the landscape – a tranquil lake, rustling trees, rounded stones, reeds. This time we leave the theatre with senses heightened and reinvigorated, listening to the night-time sounds of the farm, taking in the stars with renewed enthusiasm. Something inside us has been unlocked.
The production is set outdoors on the fields around Spier starting at sunset. On arrival, one of the performers, the Frog – played by the highly accomplished third world bunfight stalwart Abey Xakwe – comes to fetch us. We see him from a distance with a listing gait, staff in hand, bare legged, sandaled feet. His hair has a braid of white Congolese cowry shells; he wears a dusty old, purple tailcoat. A fairytale character, Xakwe is a under five feet tall with a uniquely formed – some would say deformed – body. He has an intense stare and a commanding presence. The Frog instructs us to observe nature, not to talk to one another at anytime, and “never look back”.
We follow him, walking for ten-minutes in silence. We stick together, but we are solitary. It is the start of a dream.
The first vision is revealed when we emerge from a reed-lined path at a dam. Across the water, we have a perfect perspective of a small beach on the water’s edge. Underneath an isolated clump of gum-trees, there are grey figures lying prostrate, stirring slightly; a woman in a red dress, limping, is collecting water with a vessel, and appears to be nursing to them. We think of refugees, survivors, Odysseus’ shipwrecked sailors. It is a timeless scene, perfect in its configuration.
The limping figure is Alice (inspired by Lewis Carroll’s creation). She has paraparesis and lurches about in a polio victim’s boots with metal braces on her legs. Arriving at the beach, we see the grey figures are slug-like creatures crawling in the dirt, moaning in low tones, identical, anonymous, heads covered with mud-caked body-stockings, over them black rimmed spectacles – myopic like mole rats. Bailey describes them as ‘baboon people’. Alice begins to tell us the story.
The text itself is probably the greatest departure from Bailey’s established format. The narrative nature of his previous production, medEia, seems to have led into this. The last narrator per se, in Big Dada, was eaten on stage. This time the script is mostly a narrative poem, told by Alice, with only one other speaking character – the King (also the Lord of the Underworld). Frog speaks, but only to interpret or to instruct; Euydice (Bailey’s derivation of ‘Eurydice’) sings one song, Orfeus (Bailey’s derivation of ‘Orpheus’) also only sings – and in Lingala.
Narration is in theatre high-risk; it forces us to abstract ourselves from the action, to visualise what is told instead of composed before us. But by toning down the performances, Bailey has created a delicate and successfully balanced tripod between the story told to the audience by Alice, her interactions with the King and the characters, and their enactments of her narration. It is both a story-telling technique with traditional African roots, and a post-modern poem illustrated rather than acted out.
Faniswa Yisa (who also played the older Medea in medEia) plays Alice with her hair shaved and tied into doll-like knots, her delivery is mesmeric. The register of her voice makes her a tragedienne par excellence. I believe she is one of our greatest actors currently.
The audience is then seated under the trees on hay bales around a small stage of distressed cement blocks. On a platform to the side stands the King played by Luthando Mthi – dressed as a composite of those African kings who have as their royal wardrobe poor parodies of the Western crowns – a sort of tin-pot dictator in a ghastly dry land with the power of life and death over his subjects. He is the antithesis of Bailey’s charismatic Dada – this man is dull, his cruelty all the worse for its banality, a charmless nobody with the big gold key to Hades hanging around his neck.
Centre stage is a seated figure, covered by a white cloak. Alice removes the cloth, revealing Orfeus, with gold paint streaking his face, dressed in broderie anglais. Alice washes his feet, one of several messianic gestures in the play.
Orfeus starts to play his guitar, he swivels, facing the lake, playing to the trees, incorporating all. His beautiful melodic lines awaken the baboon creatures and they hearken to him. Soon, the King accuses him of sedition, but the power of the music is such that a brief insurrection chases the King back to his podium. Alice snatches the fairy-book styled key from his neck. Orfeus, defiant, plays on.
The music builds, but not the mad drumming of iMUMBO JUMBO, this is song-full, harmonious. The creatures are worked into a trance, banging river stones together. Yet there is something threatening in their worship of Orfeus and reverie, like the petting aggression of cats.
What follows is a spectacular moment – out of one of the grey chrysalises, emerges Euydice, also in virginal white. Ndumi Zweni who plays Euydice is a perfect counterpart to Bebe Lueki’s Orfeus. They both have the same instantly attractive delicate naivety and otherworldly air.
The music rises in celebration. This time a member of the audience becomes possessed, ripping off his clothes. Alice places a red stocking over his head, and he is wrapped in a patterned cloth. He skulks behind us in amongst the hay, hissing menacingly. “Go away snake!” says Alice and in one of those rare full stop moments in the script, she adds, “But snakes don’t take orders.”
In what should be a climax of transcendent and sublime love, Euydice sings Nick Cave’s “Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for?” This is a weak moment in the piece and a missed opportunity. The lyrics are quite feeble in the context of Bailey’s writing, and the tune has a dreadful commercial stage musical quality to it. It falls out of the production. Zweni has a sweet voice, but this is an Idols’ moment.
They fall asleep. Orfeus has one of those horrific dreams in which one is paralysed and can’t wake up. He dreams of the snake – played by the magnificently built dancer Michael Alfonso Dias, who creeps onto the stage naked except for his underwear. He bites Euydice, rapes her paralysed body, tongue flicking grotesquely, and carries her off to the underworld. The choreography here is effective, but it feels like a set piece, too conventional for Bailey. Why exactly Orfeus is unable to prevent it is not explained, it is fate, destiny intervening. Alice pleads with him not to wake up, not to reach out for his love, and find that the dream was real.
Discovering her gone, Orfeus loses his will to sing. The dull, menacing, drone of the background track in the opening moments returns. More than in any previous production, Bailey focuses on sound more than music. Together with sound engineer James Webb, they have created a soundscape installation. Speakers are buried in the grass, buzzing as we walk. As we follow Alice and the Frog to the gates of Hades and continue to walk from scene to scene, there are humming noises, sinister electronic whirring and rushing static.
We climb a steep embankment, past white crucifixes and open coffins lying in the bushes, towards the gates of Hades, decorated with African Zionist motifs. The Frog unlocks the doors, which open on squealing metal hinges, to reveal a line of long satin robes on hangers. He parts them and we enter Hell through the cupboard.
The underworld stretches out below us. There is a revolting stench of burnt meat. Bailey engages all the senses – in previous productions burning herbs. I recall once in Grahamstown, the fumes caught the throat of an ill-disposed critic driving him from the auditorium. Night has fallen now, and we can make out a series of dimly spot lit installations in the crater below.
We follow Alice and the Frog down the steep slopes and come first to the Forgotten Man, the only white actor in the cast. He is elderly, emaciated, dressed in a loincloth, sitting amongst a field scattered with large empty tins, their labels peeled off.
Orfeus appears, and sings his haunting, plaintive refrain, “Eurydice! Eurydice….!” A refrain that perseverates in our thoughts long after the play is finished. The Frog translates his song, and the reply – “Forgotten Man, have you seen my wife?” But the Forgotten man has been in Pluto’s realm for so long, he no longer knows anything.
Next is Bailey’s most awesome installation. A barbed wire encampment, a sort of laogai, with an electric fence, buzzing threateningly. On a primary red coloured floor, like a giant flag, a number of figures are seated, chains around their necks, fastened to a metal pole supporting a loudspeaker and a security spotlight. Blaring out is the voice of Hitler, in constant repetition, a few distorted phrases from one of his rabid speeches. When we first entered Hades, it sounded like a dog or the hounds of hell barking in the distance. The figures are covered with grey blankets, laboriously sewing soles on a pile of cheap shoes. When Orfeus arrives and pleads with them, they drop their blankets. We see now that they are all children, aged ten to twelve. Neither can they help Orfeus.
The next installation is one of the most chilling – the Gutted Man. Lying upside down on ‘the hill of atrocities’, he has rusted bolts sticking out of his eyes. He is strapped down to a mound of car and truck tyres, and has been disembowelled, his white and red intestines snaking out across the black rubber, a red light glowing from within. His body is spasmodically convulsed by electric shocks. Orfeus receives the same unhelpful answer. Desperate, he continues.
Now we arrive in the den of the lord of the underworld, the self-same King. He sits, whisky in hand, ominously scrutinising figures on a black and white computer monitor – an image of the utter calculating indifference of greed. Around him is the all too familiar detritus of corruption in the developing world – used syringes litter the floor, electronic goods, medical supplies and loot are piled about him, boxes of United Nations baby aid ripped open, some have dead bodies lying in them.
We learn that the guardian ancestors have perished. There is no one looking over the earth. The afterlife itself has been defrauded.
Orfeus arrives and pleads with the King, calling for Euydice. None will come to him, the King scoffs, for “I popped their eardrums. All of them!” Orfeus seems about to give up, exhausted, crying, he collapses, despairingly singing again his sad refrain, “Eurydice…” But one figure starts to move, with a white mosquito net veil over her face, she slowly crawls towards him. It is Euydice and they are reunited. The King relents – tells him to take her away, but not to look back or he will loose her forever. Alice tells him to trust that Euydice is behind him.
“How strong is your faith?” Alice asks us directly.
As we follow in the wake of the fleeing Orfeus, we pass the gutted man, now crazed and moaning a song, the children shoemakers dancing serenely, the forgotten man singing feebly. If you dare to look back, you see the long line of the audience’s flashlights snaking across the crater. Then you pass back through wardrobe.
We return to the stage under the trees. We have come full circle. But Orfeus has looked back, he has lost Euydice and with it the power to save. The King kills the baboon creatures one by one with his staff. It is done simply, symbolically, almost in slow motion. The King laughs, evil triumphant.
Alice covers Orfeus with the white cloak, tells us how they tore him to pieces with a song on their lips, scattered his limbs and threw his head in the lake where it can still be seen, glowing – like the reflection of the sun.
“Let’s go home,” the Frog announces, and in silence we walk back. No clapping. No bows. The conventions of theatre shattered. Bailey will not allow his piece to be bracketed, and nullified. When you reach your car, after following his ghostly folkloric creature in silence for ten minutes, it is as if you have dreamt the whole evening. Bailey’s eclectic design and visually arresting compositions have the originality, precision and power of our subconscious.
The sacred ibises that left their roost when Bailey started production, I notice have already begun to return to the clump of trees.
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