South Africans at Edinburgh 2007

Comparisons are invidious, but instructive. An ex-South African (to use that colloquialism peculiar to white South Africa meaning a highly qualified fellow with two passports who now lives in London) tells me our National Arts Festival is no different from the Edinburgh festival. Make that festivals – half a dozen separate simultaneously held events. The Scottish capital – their host –– is architecturally splendid and multitudinous, beautiful but unsurprising, built as it is on the discreet greed of the financial instrument – banks and insurance companies forming the bedrock. Started in 1947, to affirm the creative achievements of the human spirit after the near annihilation of meaning during World War II, this year marks the 60th annual celebration of the arts.

The festival first-timer notices similarities to the Grahamstown event: the desperate fringe artists swatting patrons with flyers; the stone university buildings; makeshift venues that recall a Gothic student digs’ life; and a High Street with a dirty great cathedral (theirs is dirtier); the seething crowds – though in SA we don’t usually get teams of drunk, middle-aged women stumbling home. It’s also wet. The height of Scotland’s summer is equivalent to the depths of our winter. Robert Louis Stevenson described Edinburgh’s climate as “meteorological purgatory”. Global warming seems to have slowed the Gulf Stream denying the country any future summers, instead scorching tinder-dry Europe. And like Grahamstown, the city is teeming with an outbreak of comedians.

There is no comparison in scale. There are more stand-ups at Edinburgh than there are fringe shows at Grahamstown. Over 300 comics and over 600 comedies. Bring back King James VI for he licensed comedians (and beggars) in the 16th century. With 2000 fringe acts and over 17 000 performers, Edinburgh is seven times the size of our National Arts Festival (NAF). The only absence this year appears to be that of American patrons, so complain some impresarios.

The problem is partly that the ever-growing number of shows has outstripped the audience. Like our National Arts Festival, the open fringe has no curatorship. However, and this is a concept the Grahamstown event should seriously consider, two reliable brands of quality have been established on the open fringe – the Assembly and the Pleasance. The Assembly banner, consisting of eight separate venues scattered throughout the city, hosts over 300 shows, itself producing 25 shows, two of which so favoured are South African: Michael Lessac’s Truth in Translation and Brett Bailey’s House of the Holy Afro.

This year, Assembly founder and CEO, William Burdett-Coutts, anticipates his first financial loss in seven years, but he’s taking it in his considerable stride. It happens in this business; no need to panic.

Without a financial guarantee, it seems insane for a South African artist to even attempt Edinburgh. The economics are as foreboding as those of our NAF, except in British Pounds ten times the stake at risk. Even if sold out, the show is lucky to break even. Innumerable shows find themselves playing to audiences of fewer than twenty. Most British artists really come hoping to be discovered for television and radio. After a workshopped Jerry Springer the Opera was picked up by the National Theatre and went on to a spectacular West End run Edinburgh is awash this year with new musicals – over one hundred! There’s Orgasm the Musical, Zombie Prom, two musicals about Tony Blair, as well as several other facile agitprop pieces going by such jingles as Jihad the Musical and Failed States.

On the Royal Mile, I bump into Stef Junker (of Stef’s Sidesplitting Hypnosis) parading in the cold drizzle wearing nothing but an exiguous speedo. “We’ve decided to bring you some sunshine from sunny Souf Efrica,” he shouts, exaggerating his accent and pressing a flyer on me.

There seems to be a rite of passage, peculiar to South African performers, perhaps a hangover from cultural cringe, who feel that to stage at Edinburgh is to graduate after they have ‘passed’ Grahamstown. And there were many gold stars awarded this year. All the proudly South African productions – Lucy Heavens and Sarah Jane Scott’s Eurafrica, the Cape Dance Company, the Grammy-winning Soweto Gospel Choir’s African Spirit, as well as Translation and Afro received much coveted and judiciously awarded four-star reviews. While an exhibition of William Kentridge’s prints has introduced this master artist to a new audience.

The print critics, because of the bewildering number of shows, are powerful here, though more by way of their recommendations that bring an audience, than by their ability to put people off. However, one pities those shows listed in the daily review paper under ‘Not Recommended’– surely their titles should have sufficed – Beckett in a Bucket, Songs About Vaginas, and Find Me a Primitive Man?

The LA production of Athol Fugard’s Exits and Entrances is being favourably received too, though marred by the appalling apery of Fugard’s accent by the young man playing the autobiographical character. I preferred our Jason Ralph, but overall this production is superior because director Stephen Sachs understands that it is a struggle of styles. Morlan Higgins as André Huguenet, flamboyant not flaming, manages the crucial transition, to be stripped of disguise and affectation, not “an actor puffed up on stage”, but “an ageing fat old gay ham”, the real man bursting through his artifice.

Truth in Translation kicked off in the headlines with Hugh Masekela declaring to The Times that the ANC had sold out the struggle and he felt he was no longer welcome to trumpet transformation. He is quoted as saying, “People fight for freedom and then they forget and oppress their own people.” As if to prove his point the following week The Scotsman ran a 36-point headline: “A bully, thief and drunk who jumped the transplant queue to ‘steal’ liver – meet Dr Beetroot, health minister”, accompanied by a suitably frightful picture of Tshabalala-Msimang.

Critics seem to agree with this newspaper’s assessment that Translation is aesthetically and structurally flawed, but the subject matter transcends its formal detractions. Extracts from Lessac’s Translation will be performed at the Fringe Awards ceremony.

South African artists have certainly made good at Edinburgh this year following in the footsteps of a history of quality productions at the festival by stalwart theatre practitioners such as Andrew Buckland, Mbongeni Ngema, David Kramer, Greg Coetzee, Paul Slabolepszy, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Nicholas Ellenbogen.

August 30, 2007 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

London Theatre August 2007

Saint Joan (Olivier, National Theatre)

As George Bernard Shaw approaches the end of copyright, directors will hopefully approach his work with a renewed vigour and less reverence. Having seen a couple of museum pieces at the Shaw Festival in Canada a few years back, I approached the three hours of Saint Joan, his 1923 work, somewhat circumspectly.
I was well rewarded. Although the production was competent with Paul Ready (The Dauphin), Angus Wright (Warwick), Oliver Ford Davies (Inquisitor) turning in solid performances, it was the play itself that did the trick.
It tells the story of the brief and brutally ended life of Joan of Arc. Caught up in the machinations of the Hundred Years War, she was burned at the stake shortly after turning 19, as thanks for leading the French in victories. Twenty-five years later, in 1456, she was declared innocent. Ironically, the court that produced this just verdict was entirely corrupt, while the court that had sent her for burning was conducted with the far more sly hypocrisy of church dogma and Christian superstitions. In 1920 she was canonised a saint.
The gamine Anne-Marie Duff (of TV series Shameless fame and the film The Magdalene Sisters) plays the feisty peasant girl employing a broad Irish accent. It’s a sprightly performance, though I admit that towards the end, I was not sufficiently taken with her portrayal to wish for a delay or be heartbroken by her burning.
Shaw’s subtle arguments and his extraordinary command of the language – there are only a handful of practicing playwrights that approach his authority over English – is a rare treat.

Philistines (Lyttelton, National Theatre)

This new version by Andrew Upton of Maxim Gorky’s first play Philistines (1902) is beautifully staged by the National Theatre’s Associate Director, Howard Davies. Its naturalism caused riots in the theatre when it was first performed (Stanislavsky directed).
Set in a bourgeois home in the first years of the 20th century, this revolutionary work prefigures the cataclysmic societal upheavals that would sweep Russia. It’s worth remembering that the revolutionary Gorky, a friend of Lenin’s, and denounced and imprisoned by Tsar Nicholas II, was not much later to have his plays closed and banned by Lenin.
Magnificent production values and carefully observed performances from Phil Davis (as Vassily playing a similar role to the one he played in the BBC’s Bleakhouse) and Conleth Hill (who I last saw in Democracy) deliver the quality of production one expects, but don’t always get at the National.

A Resounding Tinkle – N.F. Simpson
Gladly Otherwise – N.F. Simpson
The Crimson Hotel – Michael Frayn

This triple bill of British ‘absurdist’ theatre is a refreshing treat. Not to be confused with the tortured existential ‘theatre of the absurd’, this is absurdity as humour. N.F. Simpson was a contemporary of the Goons, who play with paradox and logic, and a precursor of Monty Python’s extensive use of absurdity for humour in which the extraordinary is treated as the everyday. So, in A Resounding Tinkle , written fifty years ago, a suburban couple (whose surname is Paradocks) are trying to come to terms with an oversized elephant that has been delivered to their home in a scenario that is today described anachronistically as Pythonesque. The show is full of such delightful whimsy.

Frayn’s The Crimson Hotel is a particularly cunning piece of deconstructed farce in a similar vein to Woody Allen’s Lovborg’s Women Reconsidered. The script is a gift for drama teachers.

The Donmar as always makes ingenious use of sound and set design. Crimson Hotel concludes with the female lead, Lyndsey Marshal, literally disappearing in to an average-sized picnic basket!

Unfortunately, the best London critics it seems are in Edinburgh at the Festival and the third rung that have remained behind have given Absurdia a perplexed dismissal – ‘just nonsense’ declares a major daily. Fortunately, Billington managed to squeeze it in before his departure and gave it heaps of hard-earned praise.

August 27, 2007 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

At the Edinburgh Festival 2007

Ranking top of my festival experience here has to be The Battle of Stalingrad (Tbilisi Marionette Theatre). Rezo Gabdriadze, writer and director, using small puppets, recreates the tragedy of the apocalyptic battle that saw the death of a million human beings. His two protagonists, imaginatively take the form of horses (around a 100 000 horses died in Stalingrad).

I have always felt it interesting that there is no adjectival form for the English noun ‘pathos’ (from the Greek pathos meaning ‘suffering’). ‘Pathetic’ it isn’t. And the ability to arouse pathos, beyond empathy, is the essence of theatre. Without pathos, it is entertainment. Pathos has to be created – always made anew. It cannot be described. It is firmly a noun. And by concentrating on individual stories in this vast canvass, Gabdriadze’s delicately made puppets bring the full horror of a detestable history home. This is powerful, refined theatre, visualised with a freshness and ingenuity that allows us to respond to the horrific slaughter with feeling, rather than a dulled sense of the futility of man.

I highly recommend that anyone who comes within the vicinity of this theatre master makes every effort to see his work.
Visit their website www.gabriadzetheatre.ge or www.georgianseason.ge

Drawing crowds and splashing endless photographs of Alan Cumming’s cute naked butt across the magazines and newspapers is a new production of Euripides’ The Bacchae by the National Theatre of Scotland. It’s a pleasing enough entertainment, but it really boils down to a wonderful vehicle for impish Cumming, who is superb.

The experimental Wooster Group’s production of La Didone combines Francesco Cavalli’s 17th century opera with Mario Bava’s 1965 Sci-Fi B-movie horror film Planet of the Vampires in a hi-tec staging. It is visually exciting; the singers are not only technically brilliant, but blessed with pleasing voices; though once we have the concept it becomes a one-trick pony and soon begins to wear thin. The effects are clever, but alienating. You never get into either story – the opera and its parallel movie. Much of the action is awkward, the cast negotiating their way around screens and the hi-tec equipment.

Though not well received by some starchy critics and some bemused, rather literal-minded balletomanes, the Royal Ballet of Flanders production of William Forsythe’s satirical ballet Impressing the Czar is a coup de théâtre. Originally performed in Frankfurt in 1988 it shared notoriety among the outraged city fathers who eventually had enough and closed the Ballet Frankfurt.

The Brazilian dance company of Lia Rodriguez are here with Incarnat. It’s an hour long disembowelment with naked male and female dancers making gut-wrenching screams and smearing themselves with blood, gore and gruesome bits of viscera. With all due respect for these brave artists and acknowledging their sincere creative aspirations, it simply doesn’t work. I kept asking, what are they so angry about? This is protest art as mindless and the senseless violence against which presumably they are trying to draw our attention.

Also experimental and not much more successful is the Israeli-Russian physical theatre piece Orpheus. Referencing the great clowns of the stage and the silver screen, the artists employ a range of imaginative props. Unfortunately, it overplays the tricks and the result is somewhat gimmicky and sits uncomfortably.

The American one-man monologue Nijinsky’s Last Dance has played to sold out audiences. The nudity of the incredibly well-shaped and handsome soloist may have more to do with this. A professional dancer foremost, his acting can be a little hammed at times, but the script is good and it’s an easy hour on the eye.

Critically acclaimed and also sold out, but disappointing is Damascus, a new play by Scotland’s David Greig. This success of this work is that it deals in a lucid way with the issues surrounding the present crisis in the Middle East. The public is desperate for an intelligent and dramatic exposition. In other words, people need theatre to deal in a personable and accessible way with the political and abstract issues arising out of different cultures chafing against one another in a world suffering the imbalance of power and resources. But this is not Gorky, who manages that kind of dramatic dance effortlessly. Damascus becomes debate theatre. It also employs monologue, with al the awkwardness that comes form directly addressing the audience and asking rhetorical questions.

August 12, 2007 | Comments Closed

Junkie (Kalk Bay)

Junkie

To fill their theatres, managers and festival organisers are continually under pressure to dumb down. Not so at the Kalk Bay Theatre. Proprietors, Simon and Helen Cooper, over the years have regularly presented cryptic work of high artistic merit. Performer, Shirley Kirchmann has followed suit. Her last show was the exoteric Train Your Man. She returns now with the esoteric Junkie.

In a fifty-minute solo physical theatre performance, Kirchmann, from the perspective of Alice, a girl desperately trying to keep herself and her home together, lays bare the bedlam of a dysfunctional family. The father gambles, losing his earnings and the occasional winnings; the mother is a catatonic drunk; her brother, who also sexually abuses Alice, keeps running away. There is no linear narrative; the play, like Alice, is trapped in endless repetition, until she bravely makes her escape.

Alice phlegmatically asks the audience: “So you want to be entertained?” Something Kirchmann is refusing to do. Dramatically this can works to a point. But after thirty minutes, the audience starts to win the argument. The ‘play’ is in form and expression an allegory for Alice’s desperate situation, enacting rather than relating the situation.

It is high risk to create theatre eschewing pathos, only fleetingly approached here through snippets of a Chopin nocturne. However, Kirchmann does resolve her intentions artistically. The result is a crisp, well-executed performance, high in concept.

Junkie is a performance piece that could be staged as well in an art gallery. This bold, brave and solid work deserves an audience.

August 6, 2007 | Tags: | Comments Closed