Joe Barber 4 (Baxter)

joe barber

Based on a real barbershop in Parkwood, Joe Barber started in a 20-seat theatre in Tamboerskloof. Back in 1999, the theatre audience was mostly white, and the show was groundbreaking. It introduced a brand of dignified yet self-deprecating Cape humour and a range of characters vividly sketched from life on the Flats though never depicted before on stage.
Actor-creators Oscar Petersen and David Isaacs play Joe Barber and his friend Boeta Gamat, doubling as the neighbourhood skinderbek Washiela and the bergie-like Outjies.
Sold out seasons for eight years and a national tour later, they and their characters are household names. The show has moved from edgy commentary on social issues, then in a time of uncertain transformation, to a full blow commedia dell’arte celebration of local Cape culture. Joe Barber 3 felt like a karaoke television show for a life audience. Such popular success can become a millstone for artists as creative as Isaacs and Petersen. Last year they tried out a version of Dario Fo’s religious satire Mistero Buffo. One of the best things in the theatre last year, it flummoxed their mainstream audience.
The current incarnation (though supported by a tabloid) sees a return to content and reflects on local phenomena such as the break dancing era of the 1980s and the ‘Oblokke’ in Ocean View where evangelicals set up church tents.
The artifice the comic duo together with co-creator and director Heinrich Reissenhoffer still battle with is how to reinvent this sure-fire crowd-pleaser to take their audience to new horizons and keep themselves creatively nourished.

January 25, 2008 | Tags: , , | Comments Closed

Merchant of Venice (Maynardville)

The Merchant of Venice is an anti-Semitic play in which Shylock, the Jew, is an avaricious, cunning and heartless devil. Even his own daughter deserts him to become a Christian. The famous speech “Hath not a Jew eyes?…If you prick us, do we not bleed?” is easily played to opposite effect and was so construed until the late 19th century. Furthermore, the comedy, which requires a happy ending, depends upon this villainous reading.

However, the durability of Shakespeare arises from his characters containing sufficient ambiguity to allow for divergent interpretations. There is enough in Shylock for a skilful actor to inveigle a sympathetic portrayal mitigating the prejudice the play promotes. And Jeremy Crutchley is everything one wants in such a Shylock. His performance is studied, nuanced and moving, and his Shylock’s humiliation a masterclass in achieving dramatic impact. Graham Weir, as the merchant Antonio, is a perfect counterpart, as refined and controlled. The two play exceptionally well off one another.

In countering the anti-Semitism a director may also elect to recontextualise the play for instance in 1943 during the Shoah, as Roy Sargeant has, and many modern productions now do. Sargeant also has Tubal, a Jew and friend of Shylock, prominently present in the court leaving as if disapproving of Shylock, making the latter’s merciless obduracy the actions of an individual not the race. There are no such directions in Shakespeare’s text; Tubal is last mentioned in Act 3. Sargeant also adds a final scene with swastika banners in which German soldiers pin the yellow star to Shylock.

Ironically, the Merchant was actually staged in 1943 by the SS in Vienna to celebrate the successful deportation to death camps of all the Jews in the city. Shylock was played by Goebbels’s favourite Werner Krauss.

Merchant is supposed to be a comedy, but once the tragedy of Shylock is admitted, the comedy collapses. Shylock’s humiliation all but ends the play; for what do we now care about the workings out of petty love intrigues amongst a bunch of selfish and vain Fascists. This fault line is exacerbated by the vast gap between Crutchley and Weir’s naturalism, and the uninspiring leads (Clayton Boyd as Bassanio and Tessa Jubber as Portia) with their supporting cast who with a few exceptions (such as John Caviggia) are over the top, vulgarised, comic mummers. The tragedy of Shylock is a must-see; the comedy of the Merchant hard going.

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Mirror Mirror (Baxter)

Photo: Andrew Borwn

Photo: Andrew Borwn

During his six-week residency last year at the University of Cape Town, Mike van Graan wrote Mirror Mirror as a performance piece for students. They have now taken it from festivals through to the professional stage.

A prolific and reliable playwright, Van Graan continues to experiment with genre, this time turning his hand to Brechtian alienating effects and transparent theatre making with an ensemble of modern troubadours.

South African politics are allegorized around a Disney-style faux castle. Apartheid days are recast as feudal times; the white queen and her foppish royals rape and plunder the country; the sansculottes are led by the palindromic Okib (soon tortured to death); and when the peasants’ revolt succeeds the peasant leader starts the cycle all over again in a battle for power with his bribe-taking Number 2. Mirror is an entertaining, camp romp through puns on politics.

A comparison with a work employing the same aesthetic, The Fantastical History of a Useless Man, but made in 1976 to protest apartheid and colonial history, reveals the limitations of this technique in a democratic era. We no longer live in a county where the State has total control of truth and people believe a simplistic received mythology, a Bible-story past. The project then was to debunk with bunk, and the transgression was akin to burning the flag. The political stance to take was far clearer and there was a call to action. Neither is available to Mirror. The personal conscience is not here put to the screw.

Life is far more amorphous today. Mirror absorbs that shapelessness and what we have is a ramble rather than a trajectory. Unlike Useless Man, in Mirror we have no point of edifying focus (the Useless Man). Van Graan could have made the pauper Patience the epicentre, one of the “useless many” as it were, the apposite vehicle for such a parable.

What Van Graan has done is prepared students to think about their position politically as artists, something they probably had never done, though that is of limited interest to audiences. Cultural activism remains a legitimate weapon to use against the state. But an allegorized polemical column does not serve Van Graan as well as does his satirical comedies and his serious plays.

January 14, 2008 | Tags: | Comments Closed

It’s Just Not Fez (Baxter)

Fezzy
In keeping with the frivolous holiday spirit, It’s Just Not Fez is a light-hearted romantic comedy about marriage across religious and community lines. Lionel Newton, a natural comic, plays Eugene Fourie, a somewhat pathetic fellow (also known as Langballas) from the white underclass. It’s love at first sight when he accidentally meets Miss Bahia Slamang (Abduraghmaan Adams in drag).

Audience members are welcomed as guests to their wedding reception and over 70 minutes, Newton and Adams tell the story of Langballas and Miss Slamang, playing the gamut of family and familiar community characters involved in an otherwise typical wedding. There is the interference by meddlesome aunties, the minutiae of wedding arrangements from dresses to flopped breyani and some things that fortunately don’t go wrong, such as Fourie’s mandatory circumcision.

This is the sort of show that reviewers write up as “local humour”, “feel good” and “just plain fun” (or “light-hearted”). There are however problems with this type of entertainment – a trahison des clercs that feeds into the dominant culture with all its prejudices in the hope of a formula-driven cash success.

For a start, this is incredibly conservative comedy, which in my book makes it essentially unfunny. Much of the laugher derives from reinforcing stereotypes. Without placing undue emphasis on it, the humour is based in homophobia (although quite benign as these things go). The audience ooh and aah and giggle squeamishly whenever Adams is about to kiss Newton. In the same vein, the only black character is of the worst possible typecasting, a grossly overdone tsotsi clown who ‘naturally’ pulls out a gun. This kind of comedy works on trivialising emotion. Although ostensibly dealing with a potentially revealing subject it offers the commonplace instead of new insights.

January 2, 2008 | Comments Closed