Photo: Ruphin Coudyzer
Despite programme notes that try to throw the net wide, the plot, various references in the text and a portrait of Robert Mugabe on set, locates Paul Slabolepszy’s sketch of a new play, Freak Country, pretty firmly in present-day Zimbabwe.
Aaron Blakey, a quintessential Slabolepszy shmo, after knocking one too many back during his flight, while in transit to the Comoros for a film shoot, fills in his custom’s form facetiously and as a result is arrested by the authorities. Colonel Moyanga, played by the wonderfully inscrutable Jerry Mofokeng, reads the film script, ‘Operation Wildfire’, as a coup plot. Soon, Blakey, now accused of being a real mercenary, observes “the part begins to play you”. The dark humour of such a situation is comic dynamite, but the script falls far short of its potential.
The opening 20 minute monologue by Blakey to a stone-faced soldier Ndlovu (Peter Mashigo) is superfluous. The jokes are only mildly amusing and it robs the piece of its prospective dramatics for the next 30 minutes; all the pertinent information initially conveyed about Blakey and his situation is subsequently repeated, but without the benefit of our curiosity.
Antony Coleman is 15 to 20 years too young for Blakey. Although on the facts (we learn he matriculated in 1988) he is correctly cast, his frame of reference and outworn slang places him in Slabolepszy’s carefree baby boomer generation, and one keeps wishing the playwright had rather pursued this.
An ill-judged extrication in the form of a contrived escape plot takes over the last 15 minutes of the play.
The real conflict of interest here is between the discourse of a free society, where Blakey can tell the president “to kiss my ass” and the impoverished discourse of a dictatorship, where such an exertion of a fundamental right to free expression will get you before a firing squad. The slippage between the two is ripe for dramatic dark comedy, but Slabolepszy only touches on this and fails to get to grips with what is after all the heart of the scenario.
