Photo : Giovanni Sterelli.
After a bad start, this year’s Artscape Spring Drama Season of fully staged new South African plays concludes on a slightly better note with The Return by Fatima Dike. It is of course not unusual for a series of fresh works to have few successes. Even experienced outfits such as the National Theatre Studio go hopelessly wrong. But the problem locally is that the script mentoring process, which the Artscape New Writing Programme promises, is sadly not doing a good enough job. The works go to stage premature and obviously so.
In this critic’s opinion of the fifteen productions over the past four years only Beethoven in Raptus (written in 1981), Juliet Jenkin’s The Boy Who Fell from the Roof and Graham Weir’s Circus Sideshow are of note.
The season commenced with Dalliances. Not even innovative direction could rescue this one. A ludicrous plot, tissue-thin characters and dialogue riddled with clichés, this was an exercise in popular titillation as vacuous at the culture it pretended to anatomize.
It was followed by Wrestlers. Playwright Milton Schorr is an original thinker, but someone needed to point out the old adage that naturalistic dialogue is the way people speak but with all the boring bits cut out. The trivial did not become more meaningful.
The Return covers well trodden ground, constructing the barest of excuses for delivering cultural notes (greatly enjoyed by the American exchange students on the night I attended).
Overall, the playwrights have a weak sense of the theatrical. Plays are not television episodes on stage, where soap opera formats dominate and psychobabble substitutes for characterisation. The mentors need to be tougher and the playwrights will have to demonstrate greater commitment to their art. Premature professional stagings help neither. Let’s hold thumbs for 2009.
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A successful restaurateur, like a good hotelier, usually has a well developed theatrical streak. The Belgian born and Paris Ecole Internationale de Theâtre Jacques Lecoq trained comic Gaetan Schmid takes this to another dimension with his latest one man performance piece, Rumpsteak.
Playing a myriad of characters, each of which become quickly identifiable by their specific comic trait, Schmid takes the audience on a 35 minutes roller coaster racing to and fro between the chefs in the kitchens and the waiters at the tables. Performed entirely on a small cube, using only a limited number of familiar French words and miming to over 800 audio clips compiled by sound designer extraordinaire James Webb, Schmid’s performance is a master class in split-second comic timing. It’s a marathon feat that leaves one slightly frazzled, as after a good tickle.
Schmid spent time with chef Oded Schwartz and a spell in the kitchen of Rozenhof Restaurant to ensure the accuracy of his mimicry. This entertainment, like an excellent meal, is well worth a second helping.
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Photo: Jaco Marais
In our post-apartheid state, racial tension in the Western Cape between black and coloured South Africans is an explosive issue with a long and painful history. It remains a taboo subject, which is why New York based playwright Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman has resonated strongly with local audiences.
Set in South Carolina in the 1970s, this coming of age romance between childhood sweethearts – buxom, dark-skinned, dirt-poor Alma and lighter-skinned, better-off ‘yellaman’ Eugene – relates their personal struggles to overcome their private demons and to nurture their love in the face of a divided, hate-filled community as prejudiced around color issues as the greater American society.
A relentless indictment of the community it depicts, riven by internalised racism, there is little sympathy for Alma’s pauperised, alcoholic and self-loathing mother or Eugene’s vindictive, emotionally violent and physically abusive father. They are presented as the inexorable consequence of their dehumanising circumstances. With disappointing predictability, shortly after Alma and Eugene consummate their love (in what would have been a better, affirming and as powerful ending) their future is blighted by melodrama, with Eugene succumbing to the inescapable fate of most black protagonist in mainstream narratives – uncontrollable violence followed by a lengthy prison term.
Mwenya Kabwe’s (Alba) is sensational; it is hard to take one’s eyes off her. David Johnson (Eugene) is laudable, though less successful with the Geechee accent which seems to restrict his emotional range. Together they play all the other characters in what are really two parallel monologues.
Orlandersmith is foremost a performance poet and a proponent of story-telling theatre. The writing is evocative, the characters vivid, the story compelling and although issue driven, she avoids the usual pedantic pitfalls.
But I confess I am not a fan of narrative theatre (an audio book does me just fine). Even during the few times Eugene and Alma do interact on stage they narrate the action and what they feel. There is much repetition and a straight two hours of parallel monologues is long for this format. Director Lara Bye had sensibly cut about 20 minutes, but the playwright attending the opening night reversed this sensible decision. Hopefully Bye will be given a freehand to exercise some judicious cuts. The audience will agree.
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