Moron than Off (Kalk Bay)

Durban-based playwright and theatre practitioner Aldo Brincat has returned to Cape Town with his playful, well-established show Moron Than Off. The somewhat hokey title is misleading. Brincat is an original energy and as renewable as the timeless clowns of the silent movies — Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy — from whom he says he borrows.
He enters in a black peacoat — lumbering and shaven headed — a nod to Uncle Fester of the Addams Family. The simple addition of bright washing-up gloves on hands and one on his foot, transforms him into a comic object and an alien force. He uses his main prop — a rusty old saw — to cut between sketches, returning intermittently to the well-worn mime of chasing and swallowing a fly — as perfected by Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean.
Brincat clearly delights in audience contact. Almost immediately, he sets about destroying the fourth wall and sniffing out his “victims”. Members of the audience become the foils for our shared comedy. Throughout, there are no spoken words, only articulate sounds. It is highly risky to do this, but Brincat is a magical stage manager — achieving cooperative fun while keeping the experience edgy by transgressing convention and the dreary strictures of decorum.
Brincat’s creature produces a sock puppet and other visual gags from a suitcase and a box, labelled respectively: “fragile” and “danger”. It is between these two dramatic poles — of sensitivity and threat — that his comedy operates. Like a pre-socialised child, he revels in anything slimy — false teeth, raw eggs and he even eats spaghetti out of an old boot. Nor is Brincat afraid to bleed for his art. In order not to spoil the joke, I can only mention here that some of his capers might not be out of place on something akin to Fear Factor.

April 27, 2006 | Tags: | Comments Closed

Kusalawula Yena (He Still Rules) Little Theatre

It is hardly a moot point that the lack of dramas in African languages on our stages borders on the astonishing, if not the schizophrenic. After all, the visionary Sol Plaatje was translating several of Shakespeare’s plays into Setswana including A Comedy of Errors (Diposho-posho) in the 1920s and Robert Sobukwe was even working on a Zulu translation of Macbeth in the 1950s. Play after play is performed in English even when this seems very contrived. Reasons there are, but it is hard to accept that at the 31st National Arts Festival (NAF) there was still not a single African language play on the main stage. Even in film it has been a problem. I suspect that part of the success of Tsotsi and U-Carmen eKhayelitsha was that they were in the languages of reality.

Equally, it should also be of concern that there is almost no Afrikaans theatre – historically a vital energy in our cultural landscape – at the NAF. In the last decade we have seen more division, not less. One of the only Afrikaans pieces at the NAF last year was Kobus Moolman’s Full Circle about disenfranchised poor white Afrikaans right-wing fundamentalists plotting to overthrow the democratic government – performed in English! This may be perfect symbolism. But it’s a cultural disaster for the taal if Afrikaans theatre practitioners withdraw into their own festival laager in Oudsthoorn and don’t put in at Grahamstown. The biggest festival in terms of tickets sold is now Oudsthoorn, and it is close to being exclusively Afrikaans.

The encouraging news regarding African language drama is that the University of Cape Town’s first full-length isiXhosa-only production (no subtitles) is apparently almost sold out. Kudos are due to director Thoko Ntshinga who has adapted GBS Xundu’s lengthy novel Kusalawula Yena for the stage. The projection of a digital clock dramatises the timeframe and video footage gives us the off-stage action – a little protracted in the first half. A grade 12 setwork, learners have been struggling with Xundu’s deep vernacular Xhosa. The play version has helped enormously.

The cast of second and third year students are young, but mature. Xolisa Kapakati plays Sesh Betinja, a God-fearing and successful young man who falls prey to a syndicate of professional con artists out to milk him in every possible way. We watch to see if Sesh, through his stubborn – almost naive – perseverance, will finally out manoeuvre the sharks. During the course of ninety minutes, he remains clear-headed and steady, though he is fleeced, robbed, mugged, nearly arrested, held up at gunpoint and beaten.

A production of this nature holds great touring possibilities. The previous performing arts’ councils regularly toured schools with setworks and dramatic extracts to introduce scholars to the magical world of theatre. Why the present department of education, and arts and culture, are not conducting similar initiatives on a massive scale is distressingly myopic. South Africa has a vast untapped audience waiting to discover theatre, especially if productions are to be in indigenous languages.

Another Grade 12 setwork, Nosel’eyibethile Akakayoji, will be directed by Itumeleng Wa-Lehulere at Artscape from May 9 to 20.

April 21, 2006 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

Residue (Intimate)

Theatre-maker Aja Marneweck dismisses heavy-handed criticism of her latest work in one of the dailies as blatant male chauvinism. “I suppose that it is expected when dealing with themes that strike at the core of a diseased patriarchal society and centuries of making and breaking the feminine,” she says.

I have to agree. There was no engagement with her work, and it was quite clear even its most basic content hadn’t even been understood. This was yet another case of challenging work arbitrarily dismissed by the television sated.

With the Zuma rape trial daily in the press it seems indispensable that we have at least one theatre space exposing the nation’s violent phallocentric subconscious through new and dangerous work.

Yet Residue has moments of grotesque humour. Central is a colossal female character – played with wonderful and contagious exuberance by Vaneshree Lingham – in a huge dress that seems to have a life of its own. The other characters, both from the past and present, emerge from under it, while video clips are projected on to her giant skirt. There is the classic footage of a woman in chiffon running through a forest – an image that immediately in this country is enough without any other reference to conger up the spectre of rape.

There is no story, but instead a series of emotional inscapes that unfold, exploring the issues of how women are constructed. In one clip, a man constantly places one overcoat after another around a woman. The suffocation of a unique and creative identity is effectively captured.

Residue is undoubtedly a gruelling and recondite piece. Much of it is wordless, using screams and sounds – an intuitive deconstructed language that communicates more effectively than the scripted parts. Marneweck comments, “I found it very interesting that I got an extremely aggressive and bad review from a male reviewer at the Argus…He called the sounds obscene.”

Marneweck uses eerily striking two-foot high puppets operated by several puppeteers, and choreographed movement and dance to tell her own version of the archetypal journey of the Handless maiden in La Selva Subterránea. The amputated hands are restored, but as part of a reconstruction of the woman’s self that alienates and even violates her. It has a nightmarish quality.

With such a tightly knit cast it seems almost unfair to single out any one performer, but Tali Cervati as the handless dancer exhibited extraordinary power.

Mention too must be made of West African musician and singer Prince Alfredo who produces a beautiful guitar accompaniment.

The Paper Body Collective who workshopped this production in France, now travel to the Dance Factory in Newtown, and then to the World Festival of Puppetry Art in Prague in June.

http://www.paperbody.co.za/Site/Home.html

April 8, 2006 | Tags: | Comments Closed