Coupé

Interview and review of performance at the National Arts Festival:

Sylvaine Strike – this year’s Standard Bank Young Artist for Drama Award winner – is on her way to Grahamstown from Joeys by Shosholoza Meyl – appropriately, as her new work Coupé is set in the sleeping car of a train. We’re to rendezvous at half-past noon. Then comes the first SMS: ‘Train 3hrs late. Cell battery dying…Sylvaine’. At 13h41: ‘Truck turned over on route to Gtown. Cleaning oil spill. Road closed for 2hrs. Nice.’ The travails of travel.

When we finally meet, the ace theatre-maker is perfectly composed. “It would have been criminal to take the flight…but was it relentless?! And the slow deterioration of our railways is traumatic”. Apparently, our rail tracks are being ripped up and sold to China for scrap iron. She feels personally affronted. Strike adores trains.

The idea for Coupé came to her on the Paris metro when she studied at the Ecole International de Theatre Jacques Lecoq (until 2002). “I was alone – flippin’ lonely. I’d catch three connecting tubes to get to Lecoq, and on every one of those trips, twice, sometimes three times a day, I’d fall in love with somebody…This extraordinary thing of seeing: ‘this is the soul mate’. I see it. Let me look for a sign.” She pauses. But the person “get’s off, and it’s over.”

“I started to concentrate on this space of fantasy…The eternal seeker, the learner, which I think is a space, be it a chosen space, or a space that keeps us alive.”

The genesis of this work from The Travellers – which dealt with a small band the secluded, marginalised travelling artistes on the variety theatre circuit – is clear.

Coupé deals with three slightly comical strangers, sharing the awkward confinement of a couchette. There’s a sylph-like, but panicky French ballerina (Strike); a grossly overweight tempestuous Afrikaans man (an unrecognisably disguised Brian Webber); and a somewhat unkempt English South African (Gerard Bester). Strike’s knack is to make the ordinary misfit; they’re normal people, but aloneness nudges them towards eccentricity.

Speaking of the Paris metro, she remarks, “You start to wonder whether certain characters (on the train) are real, since they’re almost there to alter the space of the other…That after this trip they will be changed forever regardless.”

I’m reminded of the brilliant Stephen Poliakoff film script for Caught on a Train with Peggy Ashcroft and Michael Kitchen. Strike hasn’t seen it.

“How many moments are missed?” she wonders. “That’s what’s been driving this show.” After sharing an intimate space both physical and imaginary, at the terminus they will go their separate ways.

Alluding to the South African Railway insignia emblazoned on windows and cutlery, a stuffed Springbok head acts as another character. The travellers respond to this trophy with their inner voice; it is kind of looking-glass, both for introspective reflection and for teasing out their fantasies.

The climax is the night scene, which is an extraordinarily successful evocation on stage of that hypnagogic state so familiar to train travellers. The passengers meet in the confusion of their dreams. There’s an echo here of the dream sequences in Black and Blue.

As with Strike’s other works, this is a devised, collaborative effort. But this time Strike has moved from ‘directing and devising’ to ‘devising and acting’. Sue Pam-Grant, who now directs, was originally to perform in it (as it stands credited in the Festival programme). When Strike told Pam-Grant – “You’ve got to direct me!” – it was to give the work in trust. “Ek het afgekak!” laughs Strike.

“Sue Pam’s vision was initially very different from mine, but slowly and surely with improvisation, we merged”. Strike believes collaborations “feed into your own work and your own creativity – seeking something new.”

Yet Coupé indisputably carries Strike’s signature on it. She “chose the actors, what stays, what goes, the colours, the lighting, the set.” As Strike describes it, the finished work has her “particular style, a particular magic that weaves through the work, and I think Sue Pam has injected it with a certain reality, and an incredible knowledge of trains”.

Rovos Rail generously taught the actors how to be stewards and spent an entire day shunting in their Capital Park Station.

Throughout the play, the cast conjure up the sensory experience of the journey by tapping rhythmically, recreating the unforgettable mantra of trains.

“The confinement of the coupé starts to breed different sounds,” says Strike.

Philip Miller, known for creating the music for the films of artist William Kentridge, composed the score in rehearsal.

Strike elaborates, “He was totally motivated in sculpting it, and for the first time in my life I found a composer (who) supports the work, as opposed to the actors doing movement to the music. What a man!”

“I don’t think I ever understood it until now, what it means to have access to a composer.” Strike says.

Participating on the Main Festival is providing the kind of professional support a perfectionist like Strike needs.

The sense of the train is reinforced by some of the most effective and professional lighting I have seen in South Africa thanks to designer Declan Randall.

All Strike’s production values as we have come to expect are consistently high. The set for Coupé was created by Chan Nakar, who fashioned sets for Black and Blue and The Travellers, and like those sets, this is one too revolves, turned by the shunter (the gamine Toni Morkel). Strike muses, “It seems to be a recurring theme of my work, the behind and the in front, a kind of obsession. It’s come back again without (me) really wanting it to”.

“For the first time (the set is) completely round, not angular”. When you consider that a “train is so ‘unround’, it’s so long…It’s an ingenious piece of work. I am in awe of how he (Nakar) compresses what I want.”

Strike’s features too are rounder in the flesh, not the acute angularity she has under the stage lights.

Coupé is a gentler, but by no means a lesser piece than The Travellers. Although set firmly in South Africa, Strike is primarily concerned with universal themes. It is this refreshing freedom from the over-riding preoccupations of our obsessively issue driven theatre, that accounts for the tremendous response Strike’s work is receiving from audiences.

July 16, 2006 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

Maybe Sunshine Up Ahead (Intimate)

Every time I go to the Intimate Theatre, I become fonder of the place. On entering to see John Hunt’s latest play, Maybe Sunshine Up Ahead, I had an uncanny sense of déjà vu that I was back in the People’s Space, famous for its politically charged works criticising apartheid, and which I frequented as a school boy. Perhaps it was the set – a baby-pink car wreck centre stage. Director Adam Neil and designer Marcel Meyer have dressed the play up well, patches of blue sky hang like sheets of torn metal, the car seems to leak red blood on to a resin floor in flesh-coloured tones. Clearly, we are entering a metaphorical space.

Adam Neill Productions must certainly be complimented on their innovative use of sponsorship and their sophisticated marketing. They plan to travel with the show – stated rather vaguely in the programme notes – to “Kyelitsha (sic) and then on to Stellenbosch or Paarl” – as a kind of touring political debate. And that is pretty much the sum of what the show amounts to in conception.

The programme notes tell us further that the play’s themes are “being debated on a continuous and daily basis on the radio, in print media and, notably in…local and national government…at social gatherings, amongst work-peers and within families….The play brings focus to these debates by presenting some of the human experiences that spawn them”. It’s that last bit – an admission of what we expect from drama – that points to a problem with the conception of Maybe Sunshine.

Essentially, the play operates as a metaphorical commentary, but falls short on a dramatic level. The car wreck with its green, red and yellow tyres strewn about it acts as an obvious metaphor for the imperfect vehicle in which we must travel as we journey towards the new South Africa. But it isn’t as compelling a device as for example the ‘Son of the Soil’, a similarly metaphorical vehicle used by Andrew Whaley in his recent (similarly) political discourse of a play Rolling Heads (also directed by Neill). Both plays suffer the same problem, though I think Heads was a stronger piece overall, for two reasons – character and narrative.

In Maybe Sunshine there are three characters. Daniel Ndlovo (played by Zingi Mtuzula) is the honest, hard-working black proletarian with missionary school values, who describes himself as “a well behaved” black in old South Africa. Mtuzula acts well, though on the night I attended he didn’t quite reach into his emotional centre in a climactic scene in which he recalls the deaths of his children. His family has made the ultimate sacrifice in the struggle; after liberation, his other child was also senselessly killed by a ricocheting bullet. Now he is expectantly awaiting the benefits promised by the new South Africa.

Then there’s George Delport (Pierre Malherbe) retrenched by affirmative action and now in security management. His car has been stolen and he suspects the third and pivotal character Vusi, convincingly played by Mbulelo Grootboom (who Cape Town audiences most likely last saw in The Suitcase) of stealing it.

Vusi is a slick member of the nouveau noir, playing the system for all it’s worth and exhibiting the type of ostentation which is the subject of today’s column by Steven Friedman in Business Day (July 12 Business Day). “Your type has always stolen” is the observation made about him.

Much of the dialogue is the rhetorical sparring between these viewpoints (always with the author’s shadow in the background), but mostly between Vusi and the other characters. In Hunt’s allegory character tends to give way to rhetoric, realism to metaphor (Delport’s Ford turns out to be stolen anyway, symbolising the white’s ill-gotten gains).

Hunt’s play is part of a current trend. Journalist Hans Pienaar’s Three Dozen Roses which won the Jury Award for Best Script in the PANSA Festival of Contemporary Theatre Readings last year, is an example of the tedium this style can produce, if not handled correctly. Mike van Graan’s Green Man Flashing is perhaps the most successful, achieving both narrative interest and a roundness of character, though he has been less successful with the first version I saw of Some Mothers’ Sons and Hostile Takeover. Van Graan’s plays however manage to advance beyond the normal commentary we find in public debate; they state the things people think, but don’t say; and crucially they force the audience to face almost impossible moral choices. Regrettably, Hunt doesn’t get there.

In this genre of political plays, often journalistic in expression, characters tend to have things happen to them in order to produce layered or ironical situations, which the polemicist and political commentator can then exploit. There is no rule that says a play has to have a narrative structure obeying E.M. Forster’s famous law of “and then what happened?”, but it helps move the play along. Nor does a play have to have ‘rounded’ characters with some agency in their story, but I think pairing these down to the levels that Hunt has done is problematic for an audience. I miss individuated psychological motivation and human accountability in all these works.

Bluntly put, Maybe Sunshine is basically three viewpoints in search of characters and an author in search of a story.

Most people find political debate extraordinarily boring and I think it is perfectly well served in the opinion and commentary pages of our daily newspapers, a vibrant non-fiction book press, and various public channels. A play must go much further, and the tools that allow it to be more profound than a letter to the editor is its use of character and story. Dressing opinions up as drama turns theatre and the play into a kind of industrial debate. Open sessions with the audience and discussions after Maybe Sunshine with the playwright or director would be a great idea, and for many will constitute a positive and entertaining experience. I must stress here that Maybe Sunshine is by no means a write-off and a far better play than Three Dozen Roses for instance.

But I prefer the Ellenbogen school, which uses a good story and three-dimensional characters to make us face up to those hard questions we are confronted with when our private lives intersect with the broader political debate. When it is simply characters arguing political points, I am not stirred beyond accepting, rejecting, agreeing or reflecting on what they said. Without a compelling drama, I have no stake in the opinions of the characters. I am not in any way challenged as a participant in my society. Instead, Maybe Sunshine, is an obviously intelligent writer wanting to add his view to the debate.

Whereas Ndlovo and Delport have a vague realism, Vusi is the least convincing as a character. Who is Vusi? Tellingly he does not have a surname. He is essentially a white man’s construction (however left leaning). He’s a voice invented as a foil, a phantasm to express views against which a white voice feels it has to defend itself and find acknowledgment. There are no Vusis out there in the world, ‘character’ is here an intersection of reflected fears and opinions in limbo (some of them rather narrow).

Overall, Maybe Sunshine is well written, and there are many great lines. For instance one passage describes the sacrifices made during the days of apartheid in the form of church tithes as “paying money we didn’t have to someone we could not see for a job he wasn’t doing”. There are several startling images that leap at one, like the reference to a sacrificial goat pulling on its tether. Good use is also made of religious parody, which works well, while many gay and camp references are far less successful and seem unlikely – if not arbitrary – in the mouths of the characters.

The play starts to labour towards the end, finding it hard to find a resolution. It settles for optimism, the three characters all drive off together, in this case hopefully into the sunrise.

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Sizwe Banzi Is Dead

Sizwe bansi revivalsizwe bansi

1 – Sizwe Banzi is Dead – revived

Thirty-one years ago, shortly before the Soweto uprisings, two young black South African actors – Winston Ntshona and John Kani – made Broadway history. It was the first – and to this day the only – time that in winner-takes-all America two performers shared the first place for best actor at the theatre world’s Oscars – the Tony Awards. The play was Sizwe Banzi is Dead – devised by the actors together with Athol Fugard. It was a morale-boosting coup that cast the international spotlight on the cruel bonds of red tape that underpinned draconian apartheid.

The story of the honest rural black man battling a dehumanising Kafkaesque bureaucracy, who cannot find employment, because he does not possess a pass, and must assume the identity of a dead man to survive, struck a universal chord.

Now firmly cited as a classic of South African theatre, it is still widely referred to, performed and was even published in book form incorrectly as Sizwe Bansi – due to a misspelling on a poster that was sent to the Royal Court Theatre, which neither Fugard nor the actors bothered to correct, according to Brian Astbury, progenitor of the legendary Cape Town Space Theatre, which premiered the work in 1972.

Overseas success soon brought political heat. After a performance in Umtata in 1976,
the puppet Bantustan regime in the Transkei rather capriciously arrested Ntshona and Kani, for what the vulgar tinpot despot George (brother of Kaiser) Matanzima called the “vulgar” language in the play. It caused international outrage – thanks to that Tony. But harassment didn’t let up – even in 1979, the police managed to stop the opening night when the play returned to The Space after its international accolades and its 1978 run at The Market in Johannesburg.

In the 1970s Ntshona and Kani bravely toured Sizwe Banzi and The Island to schools, community halls, churches – any venue they could find in the black townships. Known collectively as the Statements plays they originated at around the same time from Fugard’s Port Elizabeth troupe – The Serpent Players. Sizwe Banzi’s reputation as a ‘watershed’ production breaking new ground was established.

Its revival in 2006 at the National Arts Festival appropriately returns the work to the Eastern Cape and features the original cast – Ntshona who turns 65 this year and Kani who is just three years younger. Theatrical facilitator Mannie Manim says they’ve been talking about doing Sizwe Banzi ever since they started their highly successful revival of The Island in 1995, and have been touring it to the capitals of the West ever since.

Director of the current South African revival Aubrey Sekhabi has not worked from the published text, but from a BBC recording made in the late 1970s. According to Sekhabi this is the version that won Kani and Nsthona the Tony.

The cast describe their rehearsal period at the State Theatre as a rewarding process of sharing. Although the ‘old boys’ – who are lifelong friends – often knocked off early, Sekhabi says they are committed, seasoned professionals – in stark contrast to many of the lackadaisical young actors he has to deal with these days. Kani’s penchant for telling stories seems to have occupied a fair portion of their time. On the opening night in 1972, Kani’s improvisation, which starts the play, went on for an hour and half, until Fugard sent a furious Ntshona on stage in the middle of yet another yarn.

The revival is doubtlessly a great commercial idea. Representing it as commemorating the thirty years since the Soweto uprisings, is a tempting hook, but stretching things rather unnecessarily. A revival of a classic work with the original cast is a perfectly legitimate activity and the producers should feel quite secure within this. Only the sourest of audiences would not wish to indulge them.

In their press release Ntshona comments that the play allows today’s audiences to experience life as it was in the “dark period of this country’s history”, while Kani maintains it is a vivid portrayal of “what it was like to have been black in South Africa at the time”. In his original review, American critic Stanley Kauffmann, rather dismissively wrote that the play was “only about the troubles of South African blacks”.

What then of its contemporary relevance. I put the question to Sekhabi, who replied that it has a significant message for “anyone living under an oppressive system anywhere in the world”. Director Peter Brook who is currently staging the work in French as Sizwe Banzi est Mort and touring it everywhere from Jerusalem to Dublin, told The Economist that the play is for him “about a fundamental lack of respect for the African” – which exists to this day in the world.

In an academic paper, Andre Brink feels ambiguous about its infusion by Fugard with European existentialism, and Anne Fuchs in her Playing the Market Theatre Johannesburg 1976-1986 regards it as “too white-oriented”. These are misgivings that should be aired and interrogated in an on-going debate about the interaction between today’s demographically shifting audiences – in terms of language, culture and age – and protest works developed under the previous dispensation.

But the proof of its enduring popularity, arguably due to its Fugardian existential transcendence of socio-political themes, and its almost continuous performance in one part of the world or another, speaks for itself.

The production moves to the Baxter Theatre, Cape Town after the National Arts Festival. It will then travel to the State Theatre in Pretoria, The Market Theatre in Johannesburg and will also be seen at the Hilton Festival.

2 – Opening night Grahamstown 2006

Revivals are always dogged by questions of contemporary relevance, but the tyranny of “why now?” needs some deflating. Sizwe Banzi is Dead is a defining work in South African theatre, and last night’s triumphant opening night featuring the original cast was a celebratory occasion.

Sexagenarians John Kani and Winston Ntshona acquitted themselves brilliantly before an adoring public. Neither man lacks vitality. Their seniority has deepened its pathos, especially considering that the actors – now venerated – were subjected to many of the shocking degradations the play relives from apartheid’s ugly past.

‘Sizwe’ – means ‘the nation’, and ‘banzi’ means ‘large’ or ‘broad’. The implication of the title was political dynamite when performed during the 1976 student revolt. Today we believe – or at least hope – we do not have a revolutionary climate. Yet the story of the honest man forced to negate his integrity by a cruel and inhumane system is always germane to the affairs of man. Playwright Athol Fugard wrote in his notebooks that, “Survival can involve betrayal of everything – beliefs, values, ideals – except Life itself”. This existential dilemma is the reason the play still speaks to people today.

Since the plot involves specific apartheid laws, it is firmly set in the 1970s. The trickiest part of performing in the present is the opening soliloquy, which historically was an improvisation on the day based on current news stories. Yet the past has many echoes, including an objectionable USA president. Then it was Nixon.

Director Aubrey Sekhabi, working from a 70s BBC recording and not the published text, has perhaps been too faithful. When the lively Styles (Kani), bearing his humiliations with humour and dignity, finally has revenge on his bosses deliberately mistranslating in Xhosa their orders to the factory workers, Sekhabi has chosen to stick to the original text and relate all of this in English. Given that a significant part of the audience here speaks Xhosa, and the rest of us should be learning, it seemed polite, but anachronistic.

Surprisingly, the age of the performers only jars when Sizwe, played by the somewhat frail Ntshona, is told he could make head message boy in fifteen years, and when it’s suggested he apply to work in the mines.

But why is such a beautiful play in need of reviving at all? Although it is a regularly prescribed for students, there have been almost no local professional productions in nearly thirty years. The Market Theatre last staged it in 1978.

A disheartened Wim Vorster at South Africa’s Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation (DALRO), says that despite many requests, permission has never been granted for a professional production. “Athol always says go ahead, but John (Kani) always says no.” Last year the Liberty Theatre on the Square begged to stage it with the vibrant young talents of James Ngcobo and Vusi Kunene. A production I would have loved to see. The world really is big enough for both. Curiously, the current run in Grahamstown is licensed through the William Morris Agency (New York), and not DALRO.

“It is sad that a great script like Sizwe Banzi has been unseen for so long,” says Vorster. The younger generation only know it in text form, published with the erroneous spelling – Bansi. At last the generation caught in the political veldfire of the Soweto Uprisings, can see Sizwe Banzi revived.

3 – Sizwe Bansi is Dead – review Baxter Theatre

The watershed South African play Sizwe Banzi is Dead, has at long last been taken out of mothballs. The original cast (from 1972-78) John Kani and Winston Ntshona acquit themselves brilliantly before an adoring public. If anything, their seniority has deepened the play’s pathos, especially when one considers that the actors – now venerated – were themselves subject to many of the shocking degradations the play relives from apartheid’s ugly past. It’s a moving experience.

Kani is at his best, delivering the opening monologue with winning charm. The last time he performed this well was in his own play Nothing but the Truth. Sizwe Banzi is clearly his natural habitat. Ntshona, now stiffening somewhat in the joints, uses it to maximum effect with precision comic timing. Surprisingly, the age of the performers only jars when Sizwe, played by the older Ntshona, is told he could make head messenger in fifteen years, and when it’s suggested he apply to work in the mines.

At a time when many whites have gone into denial and are stubbornly hard-hearted and resistant to accommodating the on-going hardships of those previously classified as non-white, the use of the words “white’ and the “white man” will come as a shock from the past. The play is a timely reminder to whites who cherish their amnesia just how brutal the system was they benefited from and presided over.

The story of the honest man forced to negate his identity and his integrity to survive in a cruel and inhumane system is always germane to the affairs of man. Playwright Athol Fugard wrote in his notebooks that, “Survival can involve betrayal of everything – beliefs, values, ideals – except Life itself”. This existential dilemma is the reason the play still speaks to people today. Sizwe Banzi is not only a South African classic, but a beautifully written work.

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