Reach (Baxter)

Reach

“WHY should I care about a white woman?” asks Solomon Xaba (Mbulelo Grootboom), a young black man. He answers his own question later in the play: “She runs through me”. The “she” he’s referring to is Marion Banning (Aletta Bezuidenhout), an older, white woman.
Marion is still in grief for her son. He was hijacked and killed. The details in the reporting are upsettingly familiar. We gather that a media circus followed; she had a nervous breakdown, underwent shock therapy, and seven years later has not regained her will to live. It has ended her marriage, and her remaining family have emigrated. The murderers have never been brought to justice due to police incompetence and an intimidated local community.
The mystery which slowly unfolds is why Solomon has come, and why has he watched her secretly for months. When he finally enters her home, she says she hopes he has come to kill her and save her the trouble. She is suspicious. Her house is earmarked for land distribution and the community want her removed. We know from what he has said that someone has sent him.
The dilemma of their relationship is summed up in a brief interchange around the word “boy”. Solomon receives it as racist paternalism. She says it as a “caring word”, a word she’d use for her son, “my boy”. He concedes his late grandmother used it as an affectionate term for him.
Bezuidenhout slowly brings the despondent Marion to life, plotting the trajectory along which her character is reanimated with precision and nuance. From the outset, we know there is life and humour within her, playwright Lara Foot Newton giving Marion delightfully eccentric opinions.
Grootboom has in the last few years blossomed as an actor and his performance of Solomon is confident and natural.
Birrie le Roux’s set is exquisite. The scrim walls are at once constructed and organic. Fronds grow up the faded mauve walls and rose petals strew the floor. Marion’s roots are inextricably bound to this land; her son is buried in its soil.
This is an unpretentious, affirming work and a story beautifully told. It will work well on radio, probably better. It is more of a duologue than a straight play. Solomon has several soliloquies and Marion speaks to us through a family letter she composes. The characters spend more time directly addressing the audience than one another.
Foot Newton skilfully charts the subtle negotiation between these two individuals as they reach towards each another. As Linda Biehl said of the two perpetrators who killed her daughter Amy in an act of political violence in 1993: “I’ve grown fond of these boys. I enjoy them. They’re like my own kids. It may sound strange, but I tend to think there’s a little bit of Amy’s spirit in them.”

July 20, 2007 | Tags: , , | Comments Closed

Chaste (National Arts Festival)

Acty Tang, came of age in the 1990s. He says, “the whole country was changing, the vibe in the air was of extremities of anguish and anger and of joy.”
But, he says, “Today, there is this peace and prosperity in our present condition, but you also have these traumatic memories from the past. The pot is still stirring, but people are trying to say it is not.”
He remembers the Nineties as a golden age for theatre in South Africa, probably because it was when he first discovered the power of art. As a teenager, Tang saw two works — Magnet Theatre’s Medea and the First Physical Theatre’s The Unspeakable Story, based on an experience in the life of the surrealist painter, René Magritte. These were works in stark contrast to the plays taught at school. “I keep remembering that piece [Unspeakable], it stays with me here and here,” he says touching first his forehead, then his heart.
As it turns out, what is unspoken has become the raison d’être of Acty Tang’s work, to articulate feelings that cannot be easily expressed or understood in words.
“I want to maintain that original encounter, which is physicality, a direct link to the emotional truth, that resides in the body. I think that is the most important thing for me.”
South Africa has a strong tradition of physical theatre, broadly following two schools. There are the mime-based artists, exemplified by Andrew Buckland, and the dance-based school of Gary Gordon.
“My work has various tendencies that draw towards theatre, towards visual and sound and song. But I make dance and choreography my primary art,” he says.
Tang is interested in how “narrative and ideas interact”, but not in “a dance drama” (he rolls the r, gently mocking).
I’ve caught up with him in Grahamstown. An attractive, quiet young man, refreshingly egoless. He cuts a neat figure, tomorrow he will perform his latest work — Chaste. He has a high forehead, but still has his hair, later it will be shaven off for the premiere.
He was born in Hong Kong, but moved to Johannesburg in his pre-teens. “Here [South Africa], Hong Kong and the idea of China — my heart will always straddle those different places, therefore I think I identify with people who have experience of the diaspora, who are migrants, the marginalised.”
“And gay,” I prompt. He nods. Hong Kong is, of course, itself a liminal state. He is also to some extent ethnically marginalised. The Chinese community in Grahamstown, where Tang lives, is minute. He is sustained by creative relationships with people such as Gordon and Juanita Finestone-Praeg.
I ask him what he means by the idea of China. “I come from the generation of Tiananmen Square. Even this idea of being a Chinese I am marginal to.”
Seeing Tang’s latest work confirms that he is deserving of the accolade.
“It is a relief, an affirmation and a morale booster that my approach is recognised,” he says.
At last year’s festival Tang, almost naked, invited people to throw water over him. The year before he performed a work entitled amaQueerKwere.
Chaste is about breaking down audience resistance to themselves and to new things.
“I see a shift in young people away from a depth of emotion, from a depth of encounter, moving towards a world dominated by quick sound bites, the imagery of mass media. It’s a defence, a preference for laughter at all costs.”
His greatest challenge is “to link the avant-garde work I practice” with the broader social ethos “dominated by news bites, cellphone technology, mass media.
“The expressiveness of the body is not only achievable through the techniques recognised out there, for instance classical dance … There are other languages out there that are just not widely known.”
Tang is inspired by the avant-garde Japanese dance form of butoh, which started in 1959 and has strong connections to Yukio Mishima.
In Chaste the dancers take the audience by their hands and place them against their bodies. The traditional barriers disappear. It is particularly unusual in such an avant-garde work, where witnessing the artists’ pain is often moving, but also alienating and disturbing.
“The driving slogan of avant-garde this past century was to transgress … crossing boundaries as the task of art has exhausted itself … I believe it should shift away from this … to the idea of redemption, healing or restoration, which is also the narrative of this country, hopefully.”

July 17, 2007 | Tags: | Comments Closed

The Future of the NAF

The most sensible thing for anyone who has a sincere interest in the lifeblood of South Africa’s arts and artists is to seek out ways to build on the 33-year legacy of the Festival. One would think that those organisations and bodies who ought to have the national interest at heart would gladly step forward.
Who are they? The SABC springs to mind first. Under the Broadcasting Act of 1999 Policy Mandate (Section 10f), the SABC is meant to “enrich the cultural heritage of South Africa by providing support for traditional and contemporary artistic expression”. The Festival gives the SABC the single best opportunity in the year to deliver on this mandate. It is after all the official media sponsor of the Festival, a title it has not done enough to earn. Its parsimonious coverage and participation is well shy of what one expects from a national broadcaster who neglects the arts throughout the year. The Festival is faraway still the most representative festival we have of national talent, and it has the best potential if correctly managed to shape the future of our arts. It is the biggest event and most diversified in terms of sheer numbers of productions and the range of art forms available to festival-goers.
The private sector, big business in particular, is another. South Africa’s corporations still view the arts as social investment. Unfortunately, a charitable approach will never lead to the kind of investment required. According to the last survey undertaken by the Performing Arts Network of South Africa, in a year business when spent roughly R236 million on arts and culture sponsorships including leverage, it lavished R3,2 billion on sports sponsorships. Sport sponsorship is hellishly expensive in comparison to the arts, but the paucity of business leaders with an affinity for the performing arts means that these opportunities are missed through ignorance. The Festival is in urgent need of at least one more key sponsor. Let us hope some enterprising captain of industry will realise there’s a golden opportunity here.
Government is another key player. Tentative at first, hopefully blaming the Festival for the problems of the country is past. Pieter-Dirk Uys, who starts his satirical revue, Evita for President, by entering as Adriaan Vlok with a bucket and sponge to do penance, says he struggled at most performances to find black feet. In one case, he resorted to slipping off the shoes of a newspaper photographer shooting from the aisle. Audiences are still largely white, but it’s not Festival’s fault that the economic divide in the Eastern Cape runs roughly along racial lines. The demographics of the festival have shifted substantially and they will continue to shift in line with the country. It was however high time the Festival opened closer to the disaffected and this year the event at the Stadium Mickey Vili in Joza (which we reported on June 28) makrs an important milestone.
Political window dressing with subsidised audiences for instance is all very well, but much of it is wasteful and meaningless. Sharing creativity with more free concerts held in the areas where the majority of the population live makes better sense.
The economic spin-offs from the Festival are numerous, from temporary jobs to a spike in retail for shops. The local government should be desperate to keep this annual R50 million injection to the city’s economy. They should be offering rates rebates to address the accommodation shortage; the town planners should be looking at ways of developing infrastructure that assists at Festival time. Were the national arts festival to be held in a major city, it would dissipate – one needs look no further than at the dismal failure each year of Cape Town’s International Festival of the Arts.
Festivals develop organically, the outcome of the interests of numerous parties, yet there are custodians, in particular, the festival committee, who must come up with the necessary vision to keep the event vital. Our cultural landscape has shifted radically in the past decade, and the Festival has to respond with imagination. Longevity helps, but is not enough. Curatorship as opposed to custodianship is the missing factor. Nothing is possible if the Festival does not have a clear vision of what it is and should be. Creative excellence must be the guiding star of the Festival. Except for the benefits to loclaised audiences, everything else can be had in superior circumstances elsehwere. To attract an audience from across the country, the Festival must be the acme of arts in South Africa.

July 14, 2007 | Comments Closed

London Theatre July 2007

Cabaret (Lyric Theatre, London)
We were warned. Visiting South Africans and several London theatre practitioners told us to give this version of Cabaret a miss. I also knew it was certain to be a let-down after the superbly executed, imaginative interpretation I saw a few months ago at the Spiegeltent in Berlin, not far from Isherwood’s Nollendorfsraße and around the corner from where Gestapo’s headquarters once stood. But Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret is such a robust work, surely it would shine through? And this is the theatre capital of the world, so how bad could it possibly be?

Readers of this site know I’m not a fan of the mini-me versions of musicals we get to see at Theatre on the Bay. I am revising my opinion. Without lowering one’s standards, I can at least say that the Bay casts may not have the technical prowess or the production resources, but at least they are charismatic.

The West End is struggling for audiences this summer. Today’s Sunday Telegraph reports “Curtain comes down early on 25 West End shows”. Straight plays especially are suffering. A handful of critic-proof mega-musicals are sponging up the audiences. It’s perhaps not surprising then that several of the major daily London newspapers currently list Cabaret among their Top 5 and Pick of the Theatre. I can only guess they’re trying to be nice and are throwing a parochial lifeline to something that should have more artistic merit than We Will Rock You or Mamma Mia.

Let’s start with the set and then work out way down to the direction. If you can imagine what it must be like to be physically inside a swastika, you have some idea of the ugliness of the design.

Why Bob Fosse’s scintillating choreography has been removed is a mystery. Even more mysterious is how what has replaced it managed to earn Javier de Frutos this year’s Laurence Olivier Award for Best Theatre Choreographer. It can’t hold a candle to the original.

The emcee is James Dreyfus. South Africans note his striking resemblance to Mark Banks wearing black lipstick. Banks is funnier. A stand-up comedy version of the emcee role was not to my taste as the best reading of the part, but seemed to go down well with the hoi polloi. Kim Medcalf’s Sally Bowles is competent but uninspired. The best performance is by Andrew Maud as Ernst Ludwig – convincingly Teutonic and comfortably suave.

Director Rufus Norris, whose last production at the National, Market Boy, sent me scurrying from the theatre, plays the gay card heavily in his Cabaret. It’s now a sort of coming-out version of the original. There’s front to back nudity, however the sexuality is anything but erotic, and about as transgressive as a bout of adolescent masturbation. The ensemble indulges in puerile playground frolics. Several times the impression was created that the cast are playing at pranks. Why would any director have a lone member appear at the back of the stage doing the hula every time Fraulein Schneider says ‘pineapple’?

The Hothouse (Lyttelton, National Theatre, London)
Harold Pinter wrote his fifth play, The Hothouse, in 1958 when shock therapy was in vogue and the lobotomy had become the psychiatrist’s panacea. Set in a surreal mental institution that has sinister links to an undefined government ministry, Pinter’s Hothouse reminds one of the cult film Oh Lucky Man. The man in charge is a bumbling, authoritarian ex-colonel called Roote. Arbitrary injustices, individuals lost in the paperwork, bureaucratic mistakes, the abuse of power and torture are regular occurrences in this world. The patients are referred to only by number and not by name. I have a nasty hunch that if we knew enough we’d find out that the Hothouse could serve as a spine-chilling spoof on the inner workings of Guantanamo Bay. Stephen Moore, who I last saw as the lead in The History Boys portrays Roote (Pinter played the role himself in 1995) and gives the part just the right mix of baleful stupidity and humour.

One of the incarcerated numbers has died and another given birth to a child. The ambitious menacing Gibbs (Finbar Lynch) is charged with finding a fall guy and cleaning up the mess.

The second act holds disappointingly few surprises and the ending seems tacked on, but Pinter’s play is rewarding viewing and could have been written yesterday. A strong and even cast are tightly helmed by director Ian Rickson.

The star of the night however is the magnificent set designed by Hildegard Bechtler. Eerie, echoing metal stairways and landings, towering tiled walls, faded green enamel coated interiors, rusted radiators, dented grey metal filing cabinets – every detail recreates the depressing decay of a thoroughly unpleasant utilitarian hospital come government administration.

On accents on stage and The Rose Tattoo (Olivier, National Theatre, London)
There should be a ban on doing accents on stage. In the way that jingoist jokes and cultural stereotypes no longer hold, they belong to a time and style that has passed. Not for reasons of political correctness, but simply that today we know better. It’s unlikely anybody would pen a song like Mad Dogs and Englishman today. Besides, our ears are sharper. With global exposure, we’re becoming far harder to convince.

If a character has an accent that belongs to their native language, and they are speaking in their native language – the Queen speaking English, GW Bush struggling along in American – that’s all very well. It’s also fine if the character is speaking English as a second language and they have an accent. That is part of verisimilitude; though a challenge few actors ever really get right. Personally, I take a more radical position as I believe we’re sophisticated enough today as audiences to ‘see through’ accents. I don’t see much sense anymore in having British or South African English-speaking actors attempting American accents. I’d prefer it if they concentrated on being intelligible and convincing. I do agree to differ with those who feel accents make the make-believe of theatre more authentic.

But why should actors pretending to be Sicilians speaking to one another – presumably in Italian – which the playwright is rendering for our benefit in English – speak with ludicrous accents, and as if they have a poor grasp of their native grammar? The grammar is the playwright’s fault – an unrevised convention of mistaken imitation that dates many works – as silly as casting subtitles on a film in pidgin.

It is simply absurd to perform Chekhov in English with Russian accents; as absurd is it would be to try and imagine what kind of accent Julius Cesar or Oedipus would have attempting to pronounce modern English.

A director could of course use accents of the culture in which the work is performed, for instance to draw class parallels. This could be a way of transposing a work.

Language ability and intelligence are regularly confused. Accents make people sound stupid. That’s why film-makers made Nazis speak zat wey. It was part of ridiculing them. Faux accents are yet another artificial barrier between us and the performer, and another filter that stifles the performance, diluting the emotional energy.

In film, it is increasingly the practice that people speak the language they would speak normally to one another and subtitles are employed. Some films make use of numerous languages in this way.

The situation is even more complicated in today’s multicultural and peripatetic theatre world. Actors can be drawn from the far corners of the globe. Casting is often colour blind. Ophelia can be played by a black actress while Polonius is white. What of it?

This finally brings me to the current London production of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo. Unfortunately this was museum piece theatre. Flat and lacking passion, the thick use of typecast Italian accents destroyed what was left. Why not get a real Italian actress?

July 12, 2007 | Tags: , , | Comments Closed

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

whos afraid

Like Strindberg’s Dance of Death, Edward Albee’s masterful Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? delves into embittered marital gamesmanship. In both plays, an older couple feed each other’s mutual pathologies and devour their visitors. Get the host turns into get the guest.
Audiences will be familiar with Mike Nichols’s abiding film version, though it lingered on the sexual dalliances and many of the George’s musings on eugenics were cut from the screenplay.

Martha, Albee tells us, is 52, a ‘boisterous woman’, ‘ample, but not fleshy’. She’s married younger – 46-year-old George in the history department, ‘thin, hair growing grey’. Her father is president of the university. “There are easier things,” sighs George.

After a faculty party, a newly-wed and newly arrived-in-town couple, the hapless ingénue Honey married (we discover for her daddy’s money) to the strapping, “good-looking” Nick – he’s in the biology department you see – join George and Martha at home for more booze.

During the course of a drunken evening, overbearing Martha and withered George ridicule and demean one another. Albee’s pithy script is full of one-line stingers and ripostes that draw blood. As George puts it, “it isn’t the prettiest spectacle…seeing a couple of middle-age types hacking away at each other”.

But Nick quickly learns to play. He accepts Martha’s blatant swooning, but soon finds in the second act – entitled Walpurgisnacht – he has miscalculated. He and Honey are the clumsy witnesses to a metaphorical murder, in danger of treading the same path. Martha and George at some point did love each other. To sustain their relationship they imagined a child, a kind of allegory for what was good between them – “the one thing I’ve tried to carry pure and unscathed through the sewer of this marriage” cries Martha. But when Martha oversteps the line with yet another sexual humiliation, George decides to kill their son.

Little has dated or dented the script, though Albee has returned to this theme in his most recent and equally masterful play, The Goat – or Who is Sylvia? There is a certain point of betrayal where something breaks and nothing will ever be the same, despite regrets, despite remorse.

A testament to the script is that when first performed in 1963 Arthur Hill won the Tony Award for best actor in the part of George, and the recent revival of the play on Broadway earned Bill Irwin the same accolade. Having seen this recent revival of Who’s Afraid on Broadway, with Kathleen Turner and Irwin, I had hoped that our own accomplished team of Fiona Ramsay (Martha) and Sean Taylor (George) slogging at each other under the veteran directorship of Janice Honeyman, promised to compare favourably. There is no reason why not.

However, shortly after curtain up, I began to feel I was about to be force-fed parochial pie for the next three hours. But it’s a superbly constructed play and worth hearing for that alone.

Albee’s characters are emotionally complex and the acerbic dialogue, for all its boldness, is subtle. The problem is that there is little grasp of the type of people, the East board American intellectual, academic and socialite classes, Albee is portraying. The production team don’t understand the characters. The script is bullied for laughs; the performance without nuance.

The opening exchanges between George and Martha were disappointing. The accents are too brassy. Martha is boisterous, but not as excessively vulgar, heavily made-up and slatternly as Janice Honeyman seems to have directed. The first impression is that we’re in for a night of watching the Cheap-Laughs at home or some sitcom version of Albee’s play. In one directorial liberty, kinky red lingerie is discovered behind a couch pillow. She jumps on chairs in her high heels, glass in hand, ranting. Later on, she’s about to give George a blowjob on stage.
Sean Taylor’s George lacks playfulness and irony. He is sour when he should be dry; raging instead of cunning. When Martha says he makes her puke, George’s reply – that it’s not a very nice thing to say – is delivered as if he’s freshly wounded. Nor can you imagine him having any kind of intellectual life. The script is clear about his bookishness, which makes Martha’s henpecking and George’s academic failure all the more poignant. After all, they debate the subtle difference between abstract, abstruse and recondite. Instead, we get a stack of National Geographic magazines sitting on a coffee table.

The younger couple fare worse. Erica Wessels’s Honey is no more than a caricature from someone else’s farce. The character is already so written up by Albee that to come across plausibly a restrained approach is needed. Nicholas Pauling’s Nick is too slight, without the crucial swagger we need from him. Pauling is cocky enough, but frequently looks terrified. Nick is often unsure, never chicken. We hardly feel he poses an adulterous threat to George. It’s all rather forced, and there is little understanding of the supporting dynamic the script requires.

However – and this is not the reviewer trying to sugar coat a bitter pill – the production manages to arrive in the third act. It really is worth the wait. Albee’s powerful dramatic engine kicks in in the third act entitled The Exorcism. Taylor uses an effective rictus-faced laugh and perfectly honed timing gained from a life on the stage.

Ramsay is a redoubtable and skilful actress; despite her part being demeaned by some unfortunate choices in the interpretation, she manages to create deep sympathy for her characterisation. In the final laconic exchange with Martha, George asks: “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” “I am, George, I am.”

The conclusion is as powerful and as touching as any headlining production I have seen.

July 1, 2007 | Tags: , , , , | Comments Closed