Everybody Else (is F*!king Perfect) Baxter Sanlam Studio.

At the risk of shirking the critic’s brief, it seems appropriate after watching Karen Jeynes’s comic sketch, Everybody Else (is F*!king Perfect), to ask what it is that patrons of the theatre expect when they go and see a play? The goals of theatre managements are far clearer. They need bums on seats and will offer work they hope will appeal. They are less concerned with what makes it appeal.

With the vast array of entertainment options available – reading a book, playing computer games, watching DVDs, flipping through endless television channels, what motivates someone to go to a live performance – not a music concert, a magic show, or stand-up comedy – but specifically a play?

A work like Everybody Else is legitimised, because it has some cachet with a certain section of the public. It makes them laugh. The direction is controlled, all the performances are enjoyable, and the scenario delicious. Jeynes’s script is naturalistic, though it suffers from clichés, and exchanges frequently sound like dialogue for our benefit, rather than credible conversations. Not all lines are in keeping with their characters; the author, who has a far greater facility for language than her protagonists do, often emerges through the script.

The case should be made that the notion of theatre conjures up higher expectations than what can be found any night of the week on any number of television channels. Theatre has to do more than make us laugh or reflect reality simply and superficially; it has to challenge us with that laughter; give insights in to ourselves and our fellows; articulate what we struggle to express ourselves. We need to leave the theatre holding something other than a ticket stub. If theatre does not differentiate itself as an experience, unique from all other types of entertainment, and consistently perform that magic which only live theatre can for us, then it ceases to exist as an art form.

Even the most frivolous, dated comedies of Bernard Shaw or Noël Coward to this day challenge our opinions, or at the very least delight in tripping up our expectations of how the plot might be resolved.

Unfortunately, Everybody Else is a bit of fluff that is in one ear and out the other as quickly. New work must be encouraged. Jeynes should keep writing. It is hopelessly premature to label this a play.

February 20, 2007 | Tags: | Comments Closed

Truth in Translation (Baxter)

Robert Koen and Fana Mokoena
To slay the gorgon Medusa, the Greek hero Perseus observed the monster’s reflection in his shield. Looking at “the beast” (as Archbishop Tutu described our past during the Truth Reconciliation Commission) directly would turn one to stone. Similarly, in Truth in Translation, director Michael Lessac has astutely chosen the perspective of the interpreters for the TRC as his principle protagonists to deconstruct our nation’s response to those gruesome and gruelling public hearings.

This provides a cunning dramatic conceit; the translators become actors, speaking words not authored by themselves. “Traduttore, traditore” say the Italians, meaning ‘translator, traitor’. In the opening lines, the audience is challenged and the interpreters instructed not to feel and not to become emotionally overwhelmed by the testimony we will hear.

Lessac perhaps errs on the side of caution. Possibly the best indigenous debate theatre I’ve seen, it succeeds as a realistic recounting of how a wide range of individual South Africans struggle to come to grips with the atrocities committed under apartheid. The dialogue is pithy and provocative, but far too many narratives, the repetitive bathos of crass humour – that of the journalist’s barroom, manufactured scuffles and some faux rôle playing that defies our suspension of disbelief, has a strangely dulling effect. Sometimes it feels like a show designed by committee as opposed to the achievement of the collective.

The stellar cast, led by Andrew Buckland, Fana Mokoena, Jeroen Kranenburg and Nick Boraine, are across the board estimable.

Hugh Masekela’s evocative compositions often work against the material having the undesired effect of entertaining musical interludes rather than deepening our compassion. It is in the solo numbers, notably Thembi Mtshali-Jones’s heart-rending song asking for the bones of the dead, that Masekela heightens the visceral impact.

Setting testimony to music as lyrics produces appalling results. When recounting how a woman is necklaced, the chorus soars: “She’s on fire! [fie-yah!]” Contrast this with Philip Miller’s chilling use of TRC recordings and the astonishing artistic resolution he eventually found for his cantata REwind, and you’ll understand the difference.

It’s incalculably rewarding to see a play not afraid of controversy. A blistering broadside is launched against FW de Klerk. We must hope this will encourage other writers to be as vocal.

It is vital that our theatre makers confront the horrors of the recent past and that producers do not shrink from the obvious commercial negatives of mounting such disturbing work. The subject matter is of such a nature that it overwhelms numerous critical objections born from a more formal, aesthetic and artistic sensibility. Truth in Translation can be confident of its valuable contribution to South Africa’s on-going soul searching.

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Shirley, Goodness and Mercy (Baxter Main)

zane meas christo van wyk lee-ann van rooi chad abrahams

Poet, author and 1980s UDF activist, Chris van Wyk’s childhood memoir, Shirley, Goodness and Mercy, is adapted for the stage by Janice Honeyman. Apart from bringing a commendable and eloquent book to a wider audience, there isn’t much else going for this endeavour as theatre.

If you can stomach two hours of adults playing cutesy children and babies with dummies in their mouths – in that cutesy way adults play children and babies – then you are with the mawkish majority and will find this a charming entertainment.

Van Wyk’s story is narrated simultaneously by Zane Meas as the adult Chris and Christo Davids (Booitjie and the Oubaas) as ‘Little Chris’. Story telling theatre is dramatically a weak technique. The script, notably his tribute to his mother, is beautifully written, but could do with pruning. For example, in a particularly poignant moment, Van Wyk discovers that his ouma is illiterate, although she pretends to help him choose a book. Not content to simply tell us the story and then illustrate it, the event is also explained to us.

The first half deals with Chris’s early years growing up in the coloured township of Riverlea, where he still lives. Honeyman’s stated intention is to show “we are all the same inside”. Indeed, the story could as easily be about a poor white Afrikaans family. The point has been made elsewhere that Van Wyk is a black consciousness writer, yet this consciousness is strangely absent from the production. That the Van Wyk family were politically radically different from their conservative neighbours is only lightly touched upon and papered over with nostalgia. In the 1994 election, Riverlea voted overwhelmingly for the National Party, and even in 1999, less than one in four voted for the ANC.

The second half, which explores a lone Chris battling the apartheid security forces, lapses into a perfunctory chronology of events. Narrated from the stage, this is marginally more moving than reading the newspapers or any ghastly chronicle. Read the book.

February 7, 2007 | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed

Kissed by Brel (Intimate Theatre)

Kissed by Brel

Local chanteuse, Claire Watling, after a noticeable absence as a cabaret soloist, makes an inspired comeback with Kissed by Brel.

After Jacques Brel’s enormous European success spread to the English language countries in the late Sixties and early Seventies, Brel is somewhat off-Broadway these days. His lyrics are perhaps too complex for popular tastes, though the raw emotion they convey and the striking images he uses are apparent to Everyman, the intelligence behind them is subtle, layered and poetic. Brel is quintessentially theatrical – compassionate, even when viciously sardonic. Notoriously difficult to translate, the English lyrics do him fair justice – some more so than others – but it allows local audiences to enjoy Brel’s wit and insight.

From the hundred songs the Belgian genius left at his premature death, director Geoffrey Hyland has chosen well. Kicking off with the lyrical Carousel, the running order is perfectly judged, with finely timed shifts between darkness and relief, hinging on three climactic numbers, evenly spaced – If you go away (Ne me quitte pas), Marieke and Amsterdam.

Hyland has ensured this is a tour de force. Godfrey Johnson is a rare piano accompanist whose distilled musical arrangements heighten Brel’s pathos. Luke Ellenbogen’s masterful lighting design accentuates Watling’s performance, and Dicky Longhurst’s striking silk satin costume and chiffon scarf gives her the star quality she deserves. Hyland’s simple, elegant, black set is cunningly sympathetic to the edgy theatrical space the Intimate Theatre has become for Cape Town audiences.

Watling is spellbinding. An extraordinary vocal range, superb timbre, and
a riveting dramatic presence, add up for a potent combination. It is uncanny how as a female singer, Watling makes Brel’s virile masculine songs work flawlessly. Having heard Ute Lemper’s rendition of Amsterdam sung in English, Watling need take no prisoners.

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