Three Wiser Men (Baxter Theatre) Until January 9

Photo: Jesee Kramer

Photo: Jesse Kramer
PHOTOS: JESSE KRAMER

After the success of the Three Wise Men last year, popular stand-up comedians, Marc Lottering, Riaad Moosa and Nik Rabinowitz, return once more under the direction of David Kramer to bring seasonal cheer as Three Wiser Men – one Christian, one Moslem, one Jewish.

In each half of the show, they each take a turn at the mike and end with a skit involving all three, the first a rehash of last year, in drag as their alter egos – Auntie Merle, Aysha and Beryl Rosenberg. Between acts, Donvino Prins’s live onstage band provides musical entertainment.

All three have their comic shtick down pat. Rabinowitz makes some political comment, one sketch imagining what happens when the police shoot-to-kill policy is implemented; Lottering has humorous observations around Facebook and end of year parties; Riaad is the freshest with various Moslem and Indian jokes.

It is a new show, yet last time it felt more creative; there were some poignant moments and the emphasis wasn’t so much on verbal slapstick. This time I had the impression I was watching highly successful comics doing their spiel – the Biltong & Pot Roast (of SABC 1970s) for today’s generation.

December 24, 2009 | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed

Monkey Nuts (Baxter Studio) Until January 9

Photo: Louis Chetty

Photo: Louis Chetty

The creative husband and wife team of writer and director Geraldine Naidoo and performer Matthew Ribnick, who burst onto the scene in 2002 with The Chilli Boy, followed by Hoot, have added a third comic one-hander to their repertoire, Monkey Nuts.

In Chilli Boy, the hero is a white gangster possessed by the spirit of an Indian woman with unfinished business on earth. In Hoot, a wealthy white businessman, ruined by divorce, hits rock bottom and becomes a taxi operator. Naidoo has a forte for inventing juicy scenarios that allow her marginalised characters to infiltrate broader society, and to let their narratives take centre stage. This time its an idiot savant, Edgar Chambers, whose misfortune in love and life is counterbalanced by his luck for winning competitions.

Bullied on the playground at school, expelled for something he didn’t do, dismissed from the navy, where he was once again the fall guy, Edgar has no friends. When he wins a major prize for a fully paid trip to Italy for himself and three mates, he must defeat his enemies and find out who his true friends really are.

As always, Naidoo’s script is well tailored to Ribnick. He is less boyish, but as agile as ever. The rainbow nation once again arrives in full force with Ribnick packet switching the narrative through about 20 characters from all walks of life. If anything, there are too many; it feels cluttered with minor personae, some better observed than others, with the effect that in trying to dazzle us with a full repertoire, such virtuosity keeps us at a remove rather than drawing us into the story.

The work has always bordered on stereotyping. It is not enough to attach novel circumstances to a character to free them from such typecasting. Manelisi (previously a gangster) is a black yoga instructor with tantric ambitions. But without much interiority, the character remains cartoon. There are also too many cheap shots for laughs, such as the gay flapper – an outlandish straight take on camp, and easy targets, such as a character suffering Tourette’s syndrome (the urban myth understanding of the disease, which is completely inaccurate of course).

This time the stereotyping has gained the upper hand, which is a great pity as it doesn’t do justice to either talent on display here. Nadioo’s work is at its best affirming, positive, embracing of mankind. South Africa is a such a rich, deep pool, why splash about in the shallow end?

December 18, 2009 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

God of Carnage (Theatre on the Bay) Until December 12

Michael Richard and Louise Saint-Claire. Photo: Suzy Bernstein

Michael Richard and Louise Saint-Claire. Photo: Suzy Bernstein

This is definitely one not to be missed. God of Carnage by French playwright Yasmina Reza (‘Art’ and Life x 3) is an up to date and devastating satire on bourgeois hypocrisy in the best French literary tradition.

Two couples meet after the son of Martin and Veronique (Michael Richard and Louise Saint-Claire) knocks the teeth out of the son of Alan and Annette (Jan Ellis and Anna-Mart van der Merwe).

As upper middle class, educated people, they decide to settle the matter in a civilized manner (without law suits) and to do the right thing (talk to the children, reconcile them, pay the medical bills).

However, with shades of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in the course of the discussions and slugging back half a bottle of rum, implications about one another’s parenting and their sense of entitlement and fault, quickly strip off any civilizing veneer. The evening soon descends into a Walpurgisnacht chaos with the couples attacking not only each other, but their own partners.

The cast across the board demonstrate wonderful ensemble playing and director Alan Swerdlow has them well mustered. Richard and van der Merwe excel at astutely observed characterisation. Saint-Claire is a big hit with the audience, often straying into farce, as does this production. Reza famously has reservations about the comic excesses of her work in translation, and here I must side with the author. Too restrained or intellectual a comedy might be less viable, but without the restraint one is robbed of what little empathy Reza has for her characters. When Veronique wails “this is the unhappiest day of my life”, we should feel something for a woman utterly humiliated. Ellis (great to have him back from Sydney, if only briefly) gives the most sympathetic portrayal, but in the least sympathetic role.

Swerdlow has chosen to relocate the work in South Africa, interjecting “shame” here and there and Ellis inserts a “klap”, but there are problems with such willy-nilly transposition. Idiom and character are so specific and intertwined, one finds it hard to place the characters and this becomes a distracting puzzle for the audience. In London the play was not transposed from France, while on Broadway, translator Christopher Hampton (who has worked with Reza on several of her plays) took great care with the adaptation.

Besides these critic’s quibbles, this a rewarding opportunity to see on our local stage a brand new, seriously minded comedy that has garnered many international accolades and deserves every one of them.

December 5, 2009 | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed

Let’s Mix It: The Samoosa Trinity (Baxter Studio)

Gary Naidoo and Chad Abrahams

Gary Naidoo and Chad Abrahams

My colleague Wilhelm Snyman described the first episode of this ‘entertainment’ as a bad school concert. I have seen extracts and have a good enough sense of the overall tenor to know it is highly unlikely to be much more than a waste of my time. Now in its fourth incarnation with no karmic reprieve in sight, here is Marianne Thamm’s review.

A Cheap Pastiche
(originally published in the Sunday Times)

Gary Naidoo and Chad Abrahams are two talented Cape Town performers. Naidoo is an accomplished actor and singer while Abrahams, who was last seen in the stage adaptation of Chris van Wyk’s, Shirley Goodness and Mercy, has a gentle and engaging stage presence.
We don’t get to see enough of them on stage which is why Naidoo and his co-author, arts editor, Rafiek Mammon, who has also directed the Let’s Mix It theatrical “brand” as they have termed it, are to be congratulated for trying to create work. But the truth is Naidoo and Abrahams would do well to find an alternative artistic platform because Lets Mix It certainly does neither of them any professional favours.
The piece, devised in the format of a talk show hosted by a character, Hadji Fatgiyah Bardien and televised from the lounge of her house in Walmer Estate, is like a bad school concert.
The programme note for this fourth installment of Lets Mix It is disingenuous. Mammon and Naidoo try to preempt criticism by preposterously claiming that the show captures “the essence of a part of Cape Flats Culture (sic) that could so easily have been ‘lost’ to theatre’” and even more outrageously that “in theatre circles we are often swayed by what the Western World calls ‘classic’ or deems suitable for our local stages”.
This is all a ruse to detract from the intellectual and artistic laziness of the production. So, in other words, beware those in theatre circles. If you do not like the show, the producer is bound to pull a Malema on you. Your inability to see artistic merit, intelligence, wit or originality, will not be because the show is devoid of all of these, but because you might be viewing it through “Western Standards”.
The truth is Let’s Mix it is a shameless pastiche of all that has gone before. Theatre makers like Solli Philander, Taliep Petersen, David Isaacs, Oscar Petersen and Heinrich Reisenhoffer, Marc Lottering, David Kramer, Stuart Taylor, Kurt Schoonraad and many others have been reflecting the “lost” voices of the Cape Flats for years. They have done so with respect for their craft and the audience. And it is exactly the skill and brilliance of these abovementioned theatre makers that has nurtured and cultivated the loyal and vast audience that flocks to the Baxter this time of year. One suspects that it is this tide of humanity that Lets Mix It is trying to ride.
If you look and listen (and not even that intently) you will see pale echoes of the hugely successful and artistically brilliant Meet Jo Barber (the Boeta Rajee creation in this case) some of Marc Lottering (whose marvelous character Galatia Geduld is copied here in a disastrous Miss Gay SA character Felicity Mybergh), David Kramer and even Matthew Ribnick’s The Chili Boy (when Boeta Rajee turns into an Indian woman after mistaking her ashes for sugar and stirring her into his coffee). Nowhere do the creators of Lets Mix It acknowledge this creative debt.
Lets Mix It: The Samoosa Trinity is full of really bad lines, stale jokes and real clunkers. For example the character Sisanda Gugushe, an awful caricature of a fat black woman, actually says; “the police are so fat they can’t even catch a cold”.
Then later in the show a bargain basement copy of Pieter Dirk Uys’s well-known kugel, Nowell Fine, actually tells one of Nowell’s old, old jokes about encountering a beggar who informs her he hasn’t eaten for four days. “Well, force yourself” is the punch line.
The writers of this show have acted as cultural magpies and there is very little that is original about it. In the end it defeats its own claim of representing “Cape Flats Culture” in any meaningful way. The fact that this series has made it thus far is proof you can fool some of the people some of the time.

December 2, 2009 | Tags: , , | Comments Closed