Known for their imaginative one-man tours de force, James Cairns (Rat) and Rob van Vuuren (Electric Juju) have much in common. Both are physical theatre practitioners par excellence, but they are also able to construct layered and complex texts. It is a wonderful extravagance to have their singular talents combined in Brother Number.
The first impression when we meet our two protagonists, the brothers Stan (Van Vuuren) and Harvey (Cairns), is that we’ve entered the familiar world of Beckett: a windowless, timeless room where two men are engaged in what appears to be some absurd, Sisyphean administrative task. We recognise too the green South African identity documents they are processing. By touching an ID to his forehead, Stan seated in a chair on top of a desk that appears to be stuck between floors, can see into the world of its holder, while Harvey creates and assigns each a unique number, apparently garnered from the floor.
How they came to be there and what exactly it is that they are doing is the business of the rest of the play, which follows a Kafkaesque journey through the labyrinthine world of the department of home affairs. Or ‘home of fears’ as we used to call it pre-1994. Sinister forces are at work at every turn. In the final minutes, the convoluted plot is somewhat clumsily unwound, resorting to the worn out classic movie formula where the villain tells all while buying the hero enough time to triumph.
Brother Number grapples with numerous ontological questions. How is our conception of ourselves determined by our genetics? What makes us unique? To what extent is our existence defined by today’s bureaucratic state?
Both performers are superb and rewarding to watch regardless of whether the audience understands the metaphysical comedy at play. The characters are appealing and there is a fair amount of clowning, even some satire, but this is a sophisticated work aimed at an intelligent audience.
