In the first decade of the 21st century, the most obvious shifts in mainstream South African theatre followed world trends. Stand-up comedy burgeoned into several annual festivals dedicated to telling jokes; Broadway style, lavish musical spectacles, mounted in our state of the art new theatres, dominated ticket sales; and the devolution of the playwright continued.
Audiences are at last showing some signs of demographic shift, but mostly in the province of entertainment. The coloured audience is now the most significant theatre audience in the Western Cape, filling runs that often last for months. The Lion King broke all previous box office records. 656 000 people saw it, at least 25% from the burgeoning black middle class. What is still to be seen is a South African musical that can rival the imports.
The demise of the well-written play pace Athol Fugard is much lamented by critics like me. The decade saw the sad constriction of Fugard’s voice. His plays have shrunk to dramatized short stories, tripping over headline-grabbing issues such as crime, AIDS and xenophobia. Living overseas and no longer working with local actors in workshop, his interactions with his home country are to their detriment now filtered by the mainstream media.
Comparisons are odious, but abroad, there is a healthy clutch of old bards, still prolific, on the mark, some sharper than ever: Alan Bennett at 75, Tom Stoppard (72), Michael Frayn (76), David Hare (62), David Mamet (62), Edward Albee (81). It was always thinner on the ground here, but our playwrights do appear to have unusually short careers. Partly it’s a vector of the tumultuous times South Africa has seen, but it is also that the sheer difficulties of mounting work has dried up many pens.
Eurocentric or not, the straight play is a valuable cultural medium for a society, especially one as complex as our own, to reflect upon itself, to articulate personal moral and ethical dilemmas where these intersect with the public space, and above all to renew us against the emotional toll life takes on us.
Much of our theatre would be far better served to us as a radio play, a short story or as an episode in a television soap opera. Hardly any local playwright seems to be able to show rather than tell or to be capable of sustaining a single scene beyond five minutes. They can’t deal with matters in real time, but imitate television. What we get are blackouts that wince on and off like migraines, and endless, tedious explication.
We are also it seems still stuck with the limitations of the one-person show; the poor man’s theatre practiced not for aesthetic or artistic reasons, but by economic default, which is not a good enough reason at all. A hopelessly overtraded genre, it has encouraged a legion of unimaginative scripts that attempt material not suitable for this treatment.
The primary medium remains English, but African languages are increasingly used on stage. Magnet Theatre’s Xhosa production ingcwaba lendoda lise ankwe ndlela (“the grave of the man is next to the road”) was a riveting and groundbreaking work.
Stylistically, where we do seem to be succeeding is in plays that are less text based, more a hybrid with physical theatre, marked by innovative direction, fair sized casts, and a synergy between European and African creativity.
That grey zone between theatre, ritual, performance art, installation, dance and fine art, is perhaps the most exciting area currently in South African theatre. Among the rising stars here are Nelisiwe Xaba, Mlu Zondi, and Ntando Cele. The annual Infecting the City (formally the Spier Arts festival) focuses on multi-disciplinary collaborations, site specific works, held anywhere but inside a theatre.
Thematically, plays have moved with the emotional trajectory of the country. One of the first works I reviewed for this paper (2003) was Fanon’s Children written by Lesego Rampolokeng. It was unrepentant protest theatre, but heralded a promising liberation from political correctness, from simply blaming the legacies of apartheid and colonialism. In this regard, theatre has continued to keep ahead of the national debate.
At the start of the decade, exile seemed the logical entry point to explore the moral complexities of the struggle, a changing society and disappointments in post-apartheid South Africa. Zakes Mda’s Bells of Armersfoort (2002), Athol Fugard’s Sorrows and Rejoicings (2002), John Kani’s Nothing But the Truth (2002), all dealt with exile; much of the conflict as much generational as racial.
Black dramatists started to unlock new themes (some previously taboo), such as homosexuality, xenophobia, the tacit complicity between traditional African beliefs and its expression as violence against women in a deeply patriarchal society.
Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom, rose to fame with a play set in a Hillbrow brothel, Cards, starring nudity and violence. His Relativity: Township Stories was elegantly choreographed, but the story quickly degenerated into a crude, predictable B-grade Hollywood serial killer thriller.
Towards the end of the decade, the dominant theme seems to be the legacy of the TRC, which uncovered more in the way of truth than it accomplished in reconciliation. Yael Farber’s MoLoRa, Lara Foot Newton’s Reach, Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother, REwind: A Cantata by composer Philip Miller, and Truth in Translation by director Michael Lessac, all explored forgiveness.
What one senses now as we enter 2010, is a new confidence emerging in the voices of our young theatre makers. The decade ahead I predict will only get better.
(Note: this article does not discuss Afrikaans theatre, which is such a vast field it deserves extensive treatment in another article)
Phenomenally Successful:
The Handspring Puppet Company (Adrian Kohler, Basil Jones)
Pieter-Dirk Uys
David Kramer
Djamaqua (Oscar Petersen, David Isaacs, Heinrich Reisenhoffer)
Pick of the Decade:
medEia (Oscar van Woensel, directed by Brett Bailey)
Not the Pick of the Decade:
Fangs (Revival)
Most overhyped:
Umojo – export, curio performance art for foreign audiences
The Tempest – the RSC’s “Africanized’ version
Relativity: Township Stories – Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom
Most underwhelming:
Mark-Dornford May’s iKrismas Kherol
Most Rewarding:
The decade saw thousands of new seats added in brand new state of the art theatres.
Most overpaid:
Mbongeni Ngema for Lion of the East
Most under-appreciated:
Echoes of our Footsteps (Itumeleng Wa-Lehulere)
ingcwaba lendoda lise ankwe ndlela (Mandla Mbothwe)
Stoutgatpassie (Dario Fo’s Mistero Buffo reworked)
Most prolific:
Mike van Graan (10 new plays in the last 10 years)
Theatre makers in the vanguard:
Brett Bailey (Orfeus, medEia, Blood Diamonds)
Yael Farber (MoLoRa)
Mcendisi Shabangu (Ten Bush)
Lara Foot Newton (Karoo Moose, Tshepang)
Mark Fleishman and Jennie Reznek (Onnest’bo, Cargo, Every year, Every Day I am Walking)
Sylvaine Strike (Coupé, The Travelling Players)
Helen Iskander and James Cuningham (Black and Blue)
Straight plays worth noting:
Nothing But The Truth (John Kani)
The Shadrack Affair (Fiona Coyne)
Green Man Flashing (Mike van Graan)
Great Revivals
Sizwe Bansi is Dead (Fugard, with original cast)
Mooi Street Moves (Paul Slabolepszy)
Hello and Goodbye (Fugard, directed by Mark Graham)
One Man Brilliance:
Andrew Buckland
Graham Weir
Rob van Vuuren
James Cairns
Aldo Brincat
Craig Morris
Pick of the New Divas:
Chuma Sopotela
Faniswa Yisa
Mwenya Kabwe
Pumeza Rashe
Andrea Dondolo
Lebogang Modiba
New promise:
Ntshieng Mokgoro – Thursday’s Child (2007), The Olive Tree (2009)
Omphile Molusi – Itsoseng (2007)
Still Going:
Nicolas Ellenbogen
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