In Briefs (On Broadway)

Photos : Pat Bromilow Downing

Photos : Pat Bromilow Downing


Marcel Meyer has made an encouraging debut with his first staged musical In Briefs, a queer little musical. After recent musicals at this venue, patrons disappointed by Bangbroek Mountain, sent fleeing by the abysmal Bachelor Girl, and now understandably sceptical, really ought to give In Briefs a chance.

The music is firmly in the Broadway mould, but particularly refreshing is it’s willingness to attempt more complex musical arrangements clearly under the inspirational influence of Stephen Sondheim – not only in subject matter but also in style. His groundbreaking Company immediately springs to mind. In Briefs too is about ambiguous domestic relationships and finding love in the inner city. At times, the individuals’ stories sung by their characters in separate locations are woven together in single melodies. Most characteristically, it is short on fantasy and concentrated in reflecting realistically a particular slice of gay society.

It is a strength of the work that Meyer is writing passionately about what he knows best. In Briefs focuses on the sexual tensions surrounding three similar, thirty-something, professional young men and two twenty-year-olds in search of fulfilment. If it were not a ghetto musical, the abundance of prime flesh on display would appear to be gratuitous titillation, but Meyer is concerned with exposing his characters in all their vulnerability. Theatre is a community activity, and in this generally non-reflective social milieu, In Briefs is of great benefit, not least because Meyer depicts those lives around him in a familiar yet aesthetic way.

Jason Ralph leads the cast, and with his show-stopping numbers Matt’s Dilemma and My One True Love is the obvious star amongst the young cast. Director Fred Abrahamse has ensured a high standard of professional production values from the set design and lighting right down to the theatre programme.

September 29, 2007 | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed

The Tricky Part (Baxter Studio)

tricky part
When Peter Hayes performed Martin Moran’s autobiographical monologue about sexual abuse, The Tricky Part, in Grahamstown earlier this year, many in the audience believed Hayes was the playwright – so convincing is his candid and unaffected portrayal. This is the first time Moran has allowed anyone else to perform the work, and in Hayes he has found a perfect doppelgänger.

Hayes has correctly opted to keep to the original, set in Colorado. In a country like South Africa where sexual abuse is endemic, the distance helps keep perspective and facilitates understanding.

Moran was sexually abused at the age of 12 by a councilor at his Jesuit school. A shy boy becoming aware of his homosexual tendencies, raised in a Catholic cultural context that made desire sinful, he believed he was somehow to blame for his abuse. After all, only the innocent at heart feel guilt. Thirty years later, he tracks down the perpetrator.

Theatre as an art is uniquely well suited to realizing the paradoxical nature of life.
Bob, the perpetrator, is treated with compassion. The abuse is acknowledged as something that has allowed Moran to shine spiritually – “what harms us, might come to restore us”. It’s about the pain that makes one who one is.

The work started as a journal – as Moran puts it: “the pen unraveling the knot inside him”. This became a book and after public readings bravely emerged as a play. There is still some residual tension between the spoken and the written word. It is superbly composed and the language is beautiful, if slightly over written, something Jaqueline Dommisse’s tight direction helps elide.

On the message in the work, Moran says: “A child’s job is to fall in love and the role of the adult is to have boundaries, period!” Bob is an “unconscious shithead” says Moran off stage, who caused enormous trauma through his thoughtless transgression.

With this work, Peter Hayes is top of his game.

September 22, 2007 | Tags: | Comments Closed

Shez Sharon (Kalk Bay)

shez sharonReminiscent of Alan Bennett’s monologue series Talking Heads, Shez Sharon – written and performed by the dynamic Nicole Franco – is a tale that unfolds during a short but pivotal period in the life of an ordinary person who must through force of circumstance take stock of their lives. In Sharon’s case her greatest regret.

Sharon is a hairdresser who sees herself as a therapist motivated by love. As the folk etymology of the title suggests, Sharon’s style is informed more by experience than education. She is full of delightful, natural malapropisms – “a leper can’t change his spots” or the verdict on her failed marriage – we were like “chalky cheese”.

Monologues in which the audience is directly asked questions, often per force rhetorical, are difficult devices theatrically. Yet Franco succeeds unusually well, in part because she effortlessly engages with the audience to create a safe space in which we become her salon clients. (In most cases, the tiny adjustments she makes to her volunteers’ appearances produce significant improvements!) It is also because Franco is one of our most stylish actresses, which we read easily through the rather simple character of the stylist she portrays. This sets up a gentle comic irony.

Sharon’s story is original yet full of familiar echoes – the young mother who gets hooked on drugs, the family scattered by migration, the discrepancies in wealth and education, and the courageous woman who triumphs over herself and then succeeds in her own business. The flaws in her character, the contradiction between how she sees herself and what she reveals are all willingly forgivable.

This is a delightful and heartening comedy in a production well helmed by director Megan Choritz.

September 14, 2007 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

Out the Box Festival 2007

Much praise and congratulations need to be heaped on Janni Younge (director) and Aja Marneweck (artistic director) and their team for putting together this year’s festival of puppetry and visual performance.

Perhaps the most exciting performances recently in South Africa originate from a blurring of installation, visual and performance art, with theatre and dance. In its third year now and building on last year’s success, the Out The Box Festival has finally arrived as a vital force on our theatre landscape.

Diarize now for next year. (See web link in the left hand column).

Festival directors, Janni Younge and Aja Marneweck, aim ‘to provide emerging and established visual theatre artists with a platform to present their work alongside award-winning international practitioners’. There is no question that the FNB Dance umbrella is responsible for the virility and high standard of South African dance. Out the Box looks set to grow into something that does the same for cutting edge theatre.

The festival is divided in two. The provocative Adult Festival (at the Little Theatre complex) involves high quality performances, a mini-conference, talks, workshops and carnivalesque parades; all in a festive environment with food, refreshment and craft stalls. The parades were a bit anti-climactic and some thought needs to go into those.

Highlights this year included several international artists. The ritualistic Dutch Puppeteers, ‘T Magisch Theatertje (Panta Rhei II) produce exquisite work with delicate glove puppets unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.

I missed the Australian circus artist Beth MacMahon (Venom) and hope that next year there can be more performances of each artist rather than only two.

The Reunion Islands’ Theater Des Alberts (Accidents) was another treat. Extremely funny yet poignant this brilliantly conceived work enchanted everyone who saw it.

Standard Bank Young Artists Award winner Acty Tang’s controlled butoh style Protect was visually breathtaking. Nobody moves on stage quite the way he does.

The Iqonga/Platform provides emerging and professional artists with a space to showcase 10 short experimental pieces.

The Family Festival (at the Baxter) makes professional puppetry available to hundreds of learners during the week. The foyer of the Baxter is transformed into a market with face painting, magic, puppet sales, and many other activities for parents and children. The gallery hosted an exhibition of Indonesian puppets.

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London Theatre September 2007

The Emperor Jones (Olivier, National Theatre)

Thea Sharrock’s restaging of her acclaimed production (at The Gate Theatre) of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones in the massive Olivier Theatre is beautifully designed and fills the space effortlessly.

Brutus Jones (played by risen star Paterson Joseph who is also in Saint Joan in repertory), escaped convict and murderer, establishes himself as a self-styled emperor and kleptocrat on a Caribbean island taxing and lauding over the “bush niggers”. Facing a revolt, he decides to flee the island. Lost in the forests, exhausted and frightened, Jones sees the ghosts of the men he has done wrong and in what is the most powerful scene, finds himself auctioned in a phantasmal slave market.

The subject matter of the play is as pertinent today as it was then. O’Neill used Haiti’s dictator Henri Christophe (who like Joes eventually committed suicide with a silver bullet) as inspiration. The staging in its day was revolutionary. When the production went on a road tour in the 1920s, death threats from the Ku Klux clan stopped its performance any further south than Norfolk. However, the theatrical devices have not weathered as well, and are today decidedly creaky. The play is eighty per cent soliloquy. Joseph plays the part in exaggerated period style as a Southern Negro. Perhaps historically accurate, though the imprecise accent once again interferes with verisimilitude, the effect edges on clowning. As a result, the terrified Jones is often comic – a buffoon. As he is stripped of his trappings, we come no closer to empathy for the man, except perhaps in the slave scene.

The action is accompanied by musicians, but the instruments are all electronically amplified, so that the drumming is more like a recorded soundtrack than a live performance. South Africans will find the effect particularly feeble. So too, the witch doctor, who has as much credibility for an African audience as the Simba chip lion.

Mention must be made of Robin Don’s brilliant revolving stage design, and superb lighting effects by Neil Austin.

September 13, 2007 | Tags: | Comments Closed

Every Year, Every Day I Am Walking (Baxter)

EVERY YEAR - Jennie Reznek Faniswa Yiso
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the largest number of undecided refugee cases in the world at the first instance and on appeal was reported by South Africa – 131,000 at the end of 2006. As Zimbabwe continues to deteriorate, the situation is unlikely to improve.

Magnet Theatre’s latest creation, Every Year, Every Day I Am Walking, was commissioned by the African Festival for Children and Young people in Yaoundé, Cameroon and is partly inspired by The Suitcase Stories, a book produced in a creative therapy process with refugee children initiated by Glynis Clacherty of Johannesburg.

Every Year is a two-hander with the versatile Jennie Reznek and tragedienne Faniswa Yisa (Medea in Brett Bailey’s medEia) as mother and daughter. A physical theatre performance it makes imaginative use of simple props. Julia Anastasopoulos’s innovative design is a model demonstration of ingenious economy. A drawing of the pastoral village is burnt by hooded militia. Pairs of shoes held in the actors’ hands trudge across sprinkled sand. The use of different textures is powerfully evocative. Neo Muyanga acoustic accompaniment sensitively underscores the action.

Driven from their home and separated from their relatives mother and daughter arrive eventually in a xenophobic city in a foreign country.

This is not only worthy work, but it lives up to high artistic standards. Director Mark Fleishman manages to balance with delicacy the big picture – the plight of deracinated individuals marooned within our society – and the personal narrative with which we have immediate and easy identification.

September 8, 2007 | Tags: , , | Comments Closed

House of Holy Afro

House of Holy Afro

Although it has still not been seen in South Africa, Brett Bailey’s The House of the Holy Afro has had successful runs in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Zimbabwe, Belgium and even Reunion Island. I finally catch it at the Edinburgh Festival. Quite unlike his other work, though carrying his signature stylistically, Afro is a quality ensemble funky camp club entertainment with house DJ Dino Moran (Ibiza, Ministry of Sound).

Bailey tells me how people have attempted to discuss the deeper symbolic meaning of the piece, such as the holy cross backdrop. “There isn’t any,” he insists. “I’m just having a bit of fun.”

The show balances cheap township tat, designer chic and pricey Vegas kitsch. As a theatre man, the acts that work best are those lead by the disguise of a charismatic character. Bailey sources a range of star iconography, from Adam Ant to Brenda Fassie. The entertainment runs the gamut of clubby reworkings of jive, gumboot dancing, Gospel and Afro-pop. Easily accessible, it’s uniquely popular in theatreland with young, late night audiences. And in Edinburgh, I saw a seventy-year-old dowager and her mousey husband tapping away with their feet to the Ugandan Yalimunyenye (“Ancestors, come down from the stars”).

At a seminar hosted by the Africa Consortium UK and The Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium (USA), Bailey is pointedly asked whether he isn’t pandering to European prejudice and exploiting African exoticism.

Bailey replies that he no longer carries his youthful arrogance. “I was naïve,” he says bluntly. This is not to deny the integrity and power of his early works. Artists must be allowed to experiment and find their way, and not be dictated to by academicians and ideologues. But he has learned lessons. Never, he says, will he bring works like iMumbo Jumbo to Europe again. Or Safari, his play about CG Jung’s central African travels. “I made the unforgivable mistake of dressing the Ugandan cast in red clay and raffia skirts. The standing ovations every night were patronising. They were not appreciating the quality of the performance.”

Yet even our official tourism marketers still promote our country with a luxuriously maned male lion and a Zulu with shield and an assegai. Looking at some of the brochures, you wouldn’t think we’d built a standing structure. “But,” counters Bailey, “when black cultural makers bring the same work it comes from the pride of a nation.”

I recall the opening night of Umoja at Artscape. There were German coach tourists with binoculars unabashedly ogling the topless African singers, while several of Cape Town’s recognisable black politicians were beaming and cheering that ‘our people’ had taken the hallowed main stage.

Bailey says he now makes works with either Europe or local audiences in mind. He does not translate works into another culture. Without the cultural literacy, Europeans cannot be blamed for seeing a work about witchcraft as whacky and absurd. “You can’t in theatre give the audience a cultural primer beforehand or some ethnographic display.” This was once seriously considered by his producing hosts.

Bailey has moved away from his initial trilogy – the plays of miracle and wonder. Recently, he has been accessing Greek mythological figures, such as Medea and Orpheus and making site-specific works.

He describes sitting in a tiny shack in Gugulethu where a goat was killed and as the red blood gushed on to the blue linoleum from China, on the television facing him Ridge and Brooke kissed in The Bold and the Beautiful.

“There is an extraordinary flavour of life in South Africa. So much that was previously dominated and destroyed is now bursting through.” The European structures and formats of theatre are no longer the be all and end all. Bailey achieves the apex of theatre – he transports his audience so thoroughly that we once again believe in the experience and ritual of theatre at the very core of what makes us to be human.

The world is taking note. Next year Bailey’s remade opera of Macbeth will tour to Austria, Switzerland, Greece and Germany and The House of the Holy Afro will tour Sydney, London and Zurich. Norrlands Opera, Sweden, have commissioned him to direct a new work. His production of Orfeus has been bought by Linz, Switzerland, which will be the European Cultural capital in 2009. Brett Bailey is co-curator with Jay Pather of the next Spier Arts Festival.

September 2, 2007 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

London September 2007

All About My Mother (The Old Vic)
The world premiere stage adaptation by Samuel Adamson of Pedro Almodóvar’s hit film Todo Sobre Mi Madre, is the first time Almodóvar has allowed his work to be done in English and the first stage adaptation he has permitted in 20 years.

It remains in its original setting – Barcelona and Madrid in 1998. Thank God the cast make no attempt at Spanish accents. The Welsh accent of Mark Gatiss as the transsexual hooker Agrado works well. It takes some time however to get used to the restrained Englishness of the performance, especially if one is familiar with Almodóvar’s fabulously volatile characters.

Diana Rigg is a treat as the larger-than-life actress Huma Rojo, but at her best when she plays Rojo playing Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire. The film does lend itself to staging, containing as it does performance themes, the subtext of Tennessee William’s play, and Agrado’s interactions with the audience. Hildegard Bechtler’s rapid fire set design achieves effortlessly the fast movie scene transitions.

Rafta Rafta… (Lyttelton, National Theatre)

The straight play is on the back foot these days. Musicals are sweeping plays from the West End stages, half of them TV show and film derivations (including can you believe it Lord of the Rings?), of which about half appear to be American. Even a venue such as the Aldwych Theatre now has Dirty Dancing. And on the horizon – Desperately Seeking Susan to the music of Blondie, and a musical recension of Gone with the Wind.

And of the few standing straight plays the most exciting new works recently created and staged are by a veteran guard of septuagenarian playwrights – Alan Bennett (The History Boys), Tom Stoppard (Rock ’n’Roll), Michael Frayn (Democracy, The Crimson Hotel) and of course Harold Pinter.

While critics are lamenting the parlous state of the straight play, Steven Berkoff told The Scotsman bluntly that he wasn’t surprised by the success of musicals because “most new plays bore me to death.” Based on the new plays by new playwrights I’ve seen I’m afraid I agree.

Rafta Rafta… is a case in point. To use the critics’ poison phrase, the audience loved in. It was quaint, competent, and despite a sprinkling of Bollywood, boring. The design was clever, the acting excellent. But it was no more than a family television sitcom, and not a very funny one at that, on stage.

Based on Bill Naughton’s All in Good Time (1963) it is set in an Indian immigrant community in Britain, lightly touching on conflict between the first and second generations.

September 1, 2007 | Comments Closed