The Chilli Boy after numerous sold out seasons in Durban and Johannesburg was the break-through production for writer Geraldine Naidoo and performer Matthew Ribnick (now her husband). First staged in 2002, it finally comes to Cape Town encouraged by Ribnick and Naidoo’s extraordinary success last year at the Baxter with their more recent creation Hoot. Ironically, this has meant it arrives actually at something of a disadvantage.
Both are humorous, one-man shows with well-crafted scripts, slickly performed and original in conception. This time, the rather delicious scenario revolves around the chilli boy, a white gangster called Troy, who is unexpectedly possessed by the reincarnated spirit of an old Indian woman with family matters to set right on earth.
Unfortunately, The Chilli Boy, from a critic’s point of view, appears rather obviously to be the artistic antecedent of Hoot. Both are exercises in the humour of recognisability, but with Hoot Ribnick and Naidoo had moved on to depict fresh characters we rarely see portrayed on our stages. It also had sharp commentary on the here and now of South Africa. Chilli Boy feels comparatively dated and the stereotyping stale with its lower-class, white mother, the Joburg gangsters – Greeks and ‘Lebs’ – and its caricature of Indian machismo.
I fear this time Naidoo and Ribnick may face some disappointment with Cape Town and visa versa. The material is not exotic enough – as it would be for say a London audience – and the humour, the characters and their vernacular are familiar yet somewhat at a remove from local taste. Cape Town should look forward to their post-Hoot phase.
Share on Facebook
We are into the second decade of the reign (some might protest tyranny) of the musical. Musicals have swept most other kinds of theatre off the boards. There has never been as great a variety – from stage adaptations of films like Oprah Winfrey’s The Color Purple to new agitprop pieces going by such jingles as Failed States. The decision then to stage Rent here and now is surprising, especially after the 2005 film adaptation failed spectacularly.
A reworking of La Bohème, it is set in 1990s New York on the eve of Mayor Giuliani’s big clean up that saw the iconic gay Marlboro poster felled and most of my artist friends empty out of the Village to take the A-train north.
Rent is a big hit, even picking up a Pulitzer, and running for 10 years in the city it is so specific to. The local production’s production values are respectable and compare favourably. But Rent rode to fame on the emotions of the time, gay liberation and resistance to the blinkered response of the Reagan administration to AIDS in the 1980s – a plague that blighted the community as TB did for Puccini’s Europe.
The thin storyline revolves around a group of friends in their Alphabet City garret as they deal with having AIDS (they are not just HIV positive). Prostitution, needle drug usage and no holds barred sex clubs are part of their liberal lifestyle.
Given the radically different nature of the HIV epidemic in South Africa, and the brutal reality we are facing, out of the innumerable musicals available Rent is a thoughtless choice.
Share on Facebook
As long as there are such things as surprise hits, we still have a chance in the theatre. Patrick Barlow’s stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film version of John Buchan’s spy thriller, The 39 Steps, is such a case.
London mainstream audiences are less familiar than we are with this style of imaginative direction – actors playing multiple roles (across gender), clowning, physical theatre, mime, and even shadow puppets. Consequently, a slick and innovative entertainment, it was catapulted to the West End to such delight of patrons it is booking until June 2008. See my London Theatre round-up January 2007.
The South African production follows the London directions meticulously – four actors play a 150 characters and create the shifting scenery from rocky Scottish landscapes to train carriages with just two ladders and four travellers’ trunks. The local production may not have the extraordinary comic Simon Gregor, though David Clatworthy and Johann Baird as the clowns do a fine job and Louise Saint-Claire is better than London’s Catherine McCormack as the femme fatale foreign agent Annabella Schmidt. Graham Hopkins as Richard Hannay, the quintessential, British gentleman adventurer at the height of Empire – unswerving, suave and heroic, puts his own stamp on the part with that hallmark twinkle in his eye.
Hannay is the classic hero – alone saving the country pursued by clumsy plods and nefarious foreign agents where no one believes him when he tells the truth only when he makes up a story they’d prefer.
Director Alan Swerdlow – who excels in this style (with his Around the World in 80 Days for example) is the perfect man at the helm, not least because of his percipience for film and his penchant for spoofery. The script follows the Hitchcock version right down to the comic stage business of the handcuffed fugitives trying to climb over a fence. It’s theatre for theatre lovers.
Share on Facebook
Love and the anxiety of separation are concomitant. In a country unfortunately all too aware of the precariousness of life, Louw Venter (a.k.a Corné of the comic duo with Twakkie in The Most Amazing Show) as a young father has fretted about what would happen if his children were left behind. In his one-man play, Out of Time, an everyday family picnic is transformed into a terrifying confrontation with our mortality.
While at some horseplay with his brother, Lukas Nel (Venter) falls with his back on a rock paralysing him. As in Graham Weir’s far darker piece Brief Descriptions, from now on, he can speak his thoughts directly to the audience, but no one else can hear him. Nel, dying, watches his young son. The dramatic monologue that ensues is his paean to him.
The scenario is a neat conceit for the helplessness all parents feel to protect their children against life’s vagaries. It is also a natural opportunity to reflect on his own father – taking the good and breaking with the destructive patterns. Venter draws neat caricatures of Nel’s childhood gang of friends and their daredevil antics.
Venter exploits the thematic possibilities successfully, but together with director Rob van Vuuren, they haven’t quite optimised the full dramatic potential of this riveting set-up. Given the situation, Out of Time is a surprising (and fitting) celebration of life and love, but leans perhaps too cautiously towards the comic with an occasional emotional hiatus rather than a climax.
Besides his many talents, clowning clearly comes naturally, but Venter is a superb actor and I’d love to see him one day in a straight part in a solid play. It is well worth seeing Venter immersing himself in his own serious dramatic work.
Share on Facebook
