When she was still based in Canada, actress Susan Danford saw Kristen Thomson’s debut play, I, Claudia. The impression this one-woman play made has led Danford to stage its South African premiere.
Claudia is twelve and well beyond her years intellectually. Her parents are divorcing. Her father is remarrying – to a woman portrayed as a slapper, after an engagement that Claudia shatteringly discovers had an unsavoury start.
This domestic drama is related through well crafted, pithy and often comic monologues from four characters – Claudia, her ailing grandfather, Lesley the fiancée, and the school caretaker – an emigrant director from an imaginary country in Eastern Europe, each with their own stylized and slightly creepy mask.
One of our finest actors, Danford switches roles with style and ease. The masks, which are made to Danford’s face and although indelibly striking and adding theatricality, after a while feel to one to be more barrier than supportive device. Young Claudia is putting on a brave face as it were, but her addresses to us are in confidence and in the privacy of the boiler room where she hides out.
There isn’t much momentum to drive the piece, but Thomson convincingly enters the mind of a precocious adolescent and she gives each of her characters pathos and clarity.
In a society with high divorce rates, Claudia will resonate widely with local audiences and the masks are sure to intrigue.
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For all the complaints one hears from some Afrikaans theatre practitioners, Afrikaans theatre has probably never been healthier. Unfettered by the censorship and conservatism of the past and equally free of the pressure to rebel, Afrikaans dramatists are eagerly exploring their boundaries. In this new dispensation, they appear at least less ideologically encumbered than their English counterparts who have fallen to what Mike van Graan has called the “theatre of conformity” or the overtly commercial.
Afrikaans theatre has blind spots of its own and can be insular. But this is a charge one could hardly raise against the prolific and dynamic creative team of Vleis, Rys & Aartappels – South Africa’s leading Afrikaans theatre company.
Established in 2001 by talented writer and determined producer Saartjie Botha together with ingenious, veteran theatre director Marthinus Basson and new blood Jaco Bouwer, they now have no less than 56 productions and theatre projects under their belt.
Their oeuvre of the past two years is currently on show in a unique festival at the Baxter Sanlam Studio (see Listings for details). Attention to design, solid scripting, thorough-paced direction and virtuoso performances characterise the work. The keystone production is ’n Lang dagreis na die nag (Andre Brink’s translation of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Days’ Journey into Night) featuring Marius Weyers and Antoinette Kellermann.
It is well worth attending as many of these fully staged productions as possible, especially if you too have tired of on the one hand commercial pandering and on the other hand half-realised work with shoddy production values, amateur acting and premature script development, ubiquitously on offer in our local English language theatre.
The company’s name ‘Meat, Rice & Potatoes’ might indicate a staple diet, but this particular troupe has courageously got their act together and are presenting a rare feast for the theatre lover.
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Honestly, if I were a producer of musicals I’d ban theatre critics. They are a stick in the mud crowd who might have fun elsewhere, but the minute you seat them in an auditorium with a proscenium arch and a three-hour running time, they suddenly have expectations. One really struggles to explain to them how entertaining The Full Monty is, but let’s try.
The characters are cardboard cutouts, they cry. But it’s a musical, dear. They go on and on that no matter how much dripping sentimental schlock you add, it doesn’t create depth of character. But it’s a musical, silly. They find the dialogue riddled with clichés, old jokes, unexamined attitudes and empty phrases. But they are snobs. They complain that every aspect of the plot is predictable after the first twenty minutes. But it’s a musical and everyone has seen the film anyway, stupid.
As for the film, they maintain it was charming; it had something to say about the way society constructs sexual roles in a particular class. The musical though, they tut-tut, has taken a perfectly good British movie and cut it off at the roots, then applied a commercial formula, diminished all content and inflated it with mawkish, redundant songs. This is the worst form of Americanization. Why do we import such mediocrity? Because they invented musicals and have a factory making them.
As for the story, the critics say it’s a big fuss about a group of regular joes who manage to lure a near hysterical audience by the childish promise of dropping their pants and showing the world their weenies, something that comes naturally to central Europeans wherever the sun shines and nobody blinks an eye.
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