Photo: Andrew Borwn
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.
