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.
