The Real Review

Experts are baffled by the astonishingly high rate of addiction (making even the Eighties crack boom in the States seem slight) with which tik – methamphetamine – has blighted the local coloured community. After all, tik has been around the world since its discovery in Japan in 1919. It never took off until it landed in the Cape Flats. The answer to this riddle is artfully told in Oscar Petersen and Heinrich Reisenhofer’s SUIP! The poor and the homeless are predictably as impotent as they were ten years ago when SUIP! was first staged, but in this updated version, the focus has subtly shifted to a nameless young boy who hardly speaks a line, played with the necessary smoldering intensity by Travis Snyders. He has latched onto a troupe of derelict alkies. We first meet them busking for money and soliciting the audience. It’s a poignant dramatic conceit. As powerless as the destitute are to control their fate, they are also victims of the stereotyped images imposed upon them. Yet here, these bergies are deliberately clowning to the gallery, playing up the behaviour expected of them, to get their fix. Ivan Abrahams plays Shaun, the street sage, poet and narrator of the piece. This acutely observed part established Abrahams’s reputation. At one point, impersonating his former farmer-employer, with floppy hat and grizzly looks, he apes the face on the Oom Tas label – Distell’s urine-gold wine since 1952. By exploiting the legendary theatricality of the bergie, the cast delicately balance the proverbial and comic with the personal and tragic. However, the bergies’ celebrated turn of phrase is strangely shy in this script. Mary Daniels plays Shaun’s cohort, Rose, who maintains the dignity of the group by upholding the tribe’s code of conduct; Shaun Arnolds (Koffie) lurches about the stage with bum crack and buttocks exposed throughout; Ilse Oppelt, as the obdurate Sophie, gives an entertaining performance, but is the least convincing, not quite shedding her class. Percussionist Wonder Made accompanies the action with sensitivity and poise on found instruments, including empty bottles. Beneath what may be an award-winning set for its simplicity and eloquence – a gigantic stack of brown beer crates in the shape of Table Mountain with a box of wine representing the upper cable car station – the story of a system of generational addiction unfolds, and the sins of the fathers inexorably leads to the horrific conclusion, from dispossessed boozers to homicidal sociopaths.

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