The Real Review

Interview with director Jonathan Munby and actors Timothy West and Samuel West for Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town. This article originally ran in the Mail & Guardian of 7 October 2011.

A Number at the Fugard Theatre
Brent Meersman talks to director Jonathan Munby and actors Timothy and Samuel West.

It is increasingly self-evident that the Earth has entered the epoch of the anthropocene, an age in which the impact of a single species, our own, is transforming the planet. Our enormous impact ranges from climate change to the remodelling of vast areas of the surface of the Earth. Today, we talk not only of the threat of global warming, but hubristically of climate engineering.

As population grows exponentially and with it mankind’s knowledge and understanding of the sciences, humans are rapidly developing the ability to alter, manipulate and create life. This biological revolution together with nanotechnology will vastly dwarf the industrial revolution that created the modern world.

Dolly the Sheep was cloned 15 years ago. The human genome has since been sequenced. Chimeras (such as a geep –a fusion of sheep and goat) and artificial life with synthetic DNA have been engineered. Scientists even modified a human embryo to fluoresce in the dark. It was destroyed. Had it lived that person would have been luminous.

Ever since the creation of the first atomic bomb more than half a century ago, man’s philosophical discourse, our ethical and moral understanding, and with it the legal and emotional implications the new sciences have for us as individuals, has been lagging far behind. We barely keep pace with the sociological implications of such new communication tools as Facebook and Twitter.

These psychological consequences for humanity in this brave new world are the subject of A Number by renowned British playwright Caryl Churchill. Written in 2002, it deals with a father (Salter) and his three sons, Bernard (B1), Bernard (B2) and Michael Black, two of whom are clones.

The play has its South African premier at the Fugard Theatre’s studio space in Cape Town with a highly acclaimed UK production.

“The space was once a church, and here they are doing a play about man who has played god,” says director Jonathan Munby.

Taking the roles of the father and sons are real life father and son Timothy and Samuel West. Both actors are well known to local audiences from their too-numerous-to-list film and television performances. For his sins, Timothy West played PW Botha in Endgame (2009).

Samuel West ventures that “with the death of Harold Pinter” Churchill is arguably the UK’s greatest dramatist. “She’s an unassuming goddess of theatre . . . I think it is [because of] her incredible use of form as well as content. She is very easily bored by the plays that she has already done . . . When she has a great success with something she is never tempted to go back to it. This play in particular [A Number] gets the marriage of form and content particularly well because of it casting three people in one.”

Timothy West adds she is “very elusive to pin down as a stylist . . . Her extraordinary use of dramatic text in a very unfamiliar way, yet it has a searing realism about it. It is frightfully difficult to learn.” He laughs. “She’s declared war on punctuation.”

“There is nobody like her [presently],” adds Munby, “a writer who experiments and is brave enough to reinvent themselves every time.”

Having a real life father and son “opens up the humanity of the play” according to Munby.

“It means we can get to the truth of what this relationship is immediately. . . it gets to the heart of it. When we started rehearsals, it was like starting in week five rather than week one.”

“I do think what it would be like to do this play with someone who wasn’t your dad,” muses Samuel West. “I’ve spent 45 years being his son and if it wasn’t [so] I’d have five weeks of rehearsal to pretend to be.”

The Wests laugh. “It certainly hasn’t drawn us apart!”

Munby adds: “The audience has a thrilling relationship with it as a piece of theatre. Of course they’re inside the drama and the characters but they’re engaging on another level with a real life father and son and seeing the similarities between them, not just physical. There’s that dialogue going on as well. . . The resonance of when Tim’s character says, ‘and I loved you’ − the resonance hits ten times deeper than if it were just two actors.”

“You get a nice laugh,” says Samuel West, “when he [Salter] says ‘just wait because I’m your father’, and another one when I say ‘you know that’”.

Reviving the play from their first run with it in 2006 has also brought new insights. And touring to South Africa means “the piece will change inevitably because there is a different audience,” says Munby. “The debate about identity in South Africa is going to be a completely different conversation from the one we had in London.”

Samuel West adds: “As you get further away from the idea of cloning [which is not particularly topical in South Africa], the play becomes less of a hot topic; cloning is the cause of the play but it is less interested in the science as a subject of drama”.

Munby says: “Churchill is more interested in the humanity and the relationships than the ethics of the sciences. She presents much more a debate about nature and nurture, about what makes us us. . . . I don’t think she is interested in the ethics of is cloning right or wrong.”

Timothy West comments that “there is officially never been an example of human cloning – that we know of – though we suspect there might be, but we know it is theoretically possible.”

A Number runs at the Fugard Theatre until October 29.

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Interview with Brent Meersman for the BBC World Service on Winnie the Opera
Listen to broadcast click here

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In a sense life paralyzes all of us. Our incessant exposure to the horrors filling television and internet screens leaves us feeling hopeless in the face of gratuitous cruelty and galling injustice on a global scale.
Broken Glass (1994), written by Arthur Miller when he was 78, is set in Brooklyn in November 1938. News of the persecution of the Jews in Germany and specifically the events of Kristallnacht, from which the play takes its title, when Jewish shops were looted and synagogues ransacked during a Nazi instigated rampage, has made the New York Times.

Sylvia Gellburg (Susan Danford) is obsessed with the news. Sylvia suffers from hysterical paralysis of her lower limbs, apparently brought on by her distress at events in Europe; this in an era when the stigma and prejudice surrounding mental disorders was pervasive. Danford is an incandescent mix of delicate vulnerability and commanding personality. She may be bedridden or wheelchair bound, but her dramatic presence seems to have the free range of the stage; it is the audience who find themselves riveted, immobilised by her flashes of passion.

Miller briefly flirts with the conceit that perhaps Sylvia’s response is the sane one, and those going about their business trying to remain unaffected by the atrocities abroad – one easily forgets how strong America isolationism was at the time – are in some sense sick.

Her husband, Phillip (Antony Sher) is filled with self-loathing. He even goes as far as to insinuate that perhaps the Jews have provoked their harassment: “It’s no excuse for what’s happening over there, but German Jews can be pretty . . . you know . . . [stuck up].”

Above all, Phillip doesn’t want to be dragged back by reminders of his people’s suffering.
He is proud to be “the only Jew ever worked for Brooklyn guarantee”; “the only Jew [who] ever set foot on that deck [of his boss’s yacht]”. Phillip has patriotic aspirations and Republican values. He has foisted a military career on his son, Jerome: “he could be the first Jewish general”.

When ingratiating himself with his boss, the Ivy League Stanton Case (Patrick Lyster) who facilitated Jerome’s career, but who talks about “you people”, Philip transforms into the fawning Jewish stereotype he so hates.

Sher’s goal is to have Phillip become not only what he hates, but also what hates him – hence his black clothes and more than a gestural nod suggestive of the Führer. Sher brilliantly harnesses the force of both prototypes.

“That’s one miserable little pisser”, as Margaret Hyman (Anthea Thompson), the wife of the physician on the case, sums him up. “I like to talk and I like to laugh,” she says. Thompson is completely at home as Margaret, the comic relief.

Phillip suffers his own manifestation of psychosomatic paralysis – erectile dysfunction and impotence. Perhaps, the play keeps hinting rather crudely, this is the root cause of Sylvia’s condition.
Sher inhabits his nasal, whining character absolutely. Most powerful are his artful silences. His personal commitment to the part is obvious. In an interview two years ago, Sher told me how, when he first moved to the United Kingdom, for many years he tried to deny his own identity – a gay, Jewish, South African: “The classical actors . . . were all such tall, handsome, essentially British men, whereas I was this little Jewish whelp from Sea Point”.

Broken Glass is at its heart about denial in its many forms and disguises. In relationships, denial leads to personal failure and the resulting regrets turn to recriminations. Sylvia’s paralysis catches Phillip wrong-footed. The marriage shatters like a Jewish shop window in Berlin.

The doctor called in to diagnose and treat Sylvia, Harry Hyman (Stephen Jennings), only precipitates the crisis as unprofessional feelings develop between him and Sylvia. It is good to see Jennings (who is married to Danford in real life) on stage again, and he certainly has his work cut out for him. Hyman is an awkward part. Miller uses him alternatively as a foil for Sylvia and Phillip.

This is true too for Syliva’s younger sister, Harriet (Claire Berlein), whose function it seems is chiefly explication, providing background and off-stage information to sustain Miller’s argument and plot.
Miller is at his best when his characters enter that deeply ironical position of people who surrender their own desires and instead allow their better selves to protect their nearest by disregarding the truth.

The ultimately fatal blow dealt Phillip is when aspersions are thrown on his loyalty to the firm and he loses the confidence and approval of his employer. His heart is now literally broken. Phillip realises he has been used all these years and remains as much an outsider as ever: “You got some lousy rotten job to do” like “close down a business” or “throw someone out of their home”, then “send in the Yid”.

Powerfully worded as the text is, it is governed more by reason that intuition. You can hear the logic of the arguments Miller is peeling open, sometimes to the point of forcing his characters.

Director Janice Honeyman has paced the production well, which is a challenge given Miller’s eleven scene changes, each of which is introduced by a lone cellist, specified in the text, presumably to represent Sylvia’s soul-filled tristesse, but which becomes a means of brooding presentation growing gradually more intrusive.

Dicky Longhurst’s set, suggesting shards of glass, is chilling, if a bit too obvious.
Appallingly, anti-Semitism never seems to go completely out of fashion, whether it’s buffoons like Charlie Sheen (who recently tweeted that his manager was a “Jew pig”), John Galliano and Mel Gibson, or politicians like Mugabe and Ahmadinejad. The play gives no glib proscriptions, except to suggest that hope must rely ultimately on compassion.

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Lara Foot, the new CEO of the Baxter, one year into the job, speaks her mind, including her views on what is needed in funding in the arts in South Africa

Inevitably, a fair bit of anxiety and some excitement attend the change of guard at any major institution. The appointment of Lara Foot as the new Chief Executive Officer of the Baxter Theatre Complex was greeted with sighs of relief by many in the Cape Town arts community. Ms Foot had after all been the resident director and dramaturge of the Baxter between 2005 and 2007.

Foot is respected by her peers as a theatre-maker; she undertook a mentoring process with Sir Peter Hall; she has won all the coveted South African awards in her field, from the Fleur du cap Outstanding Young Director award in 1992 to the Standard Bank’s Young Artist for Theatre in 1995, and over the years, the Vita and various Fleur du Cap and Naledi awards.

As CEO, she is known to be both forceful and outspoken. Running a theatre establishment in these times is not for the meek. It is a constant struggle to overcome the seemingly intractable problems that beset the arts. The list of ailments is daunting; to name a few: stymied transformation, declining audiences, rising costs, undependable grants, frail sponsorships.

Foot says her job will “always be about funding because we’re not subsidized by government”. The Baxter, arguably long the country’s most vibrant (certainly busiest) theatre, is a cornerstone of South African performing arts.

Unfortunately, despite the Baxter’s reputation and international standing, favourably comparable to the Market Theatre during apartheid (from its inception 33 years ago the Baxter followed a non–racial policy), when South Africa became a democracy, it was left out of the nine theatres the state adopted.

The Baxter has been bolstered all these years by endowment money. However, successive years of deficit, prior to Foot taking office, have drawn down the available funds.

Funding the Baxter has now become a serious issue. Foot is still seeking additional funds of R2.6 million for 2010, and has started to lobby to make up for a projected shortfall in the current year.

“What people don’t realize is that the Baxter is not subsidized.” Foot relates how she received a letter of complaint that remarked “ . . . with all the subsidy you get”.

There is also a widespread public misconception that the Baxter is supported by the University of Cape Town.

“The university is incredibly helpful in terms of administration and governance and human resources; invaluable, and they give us [R]1.3 million towards operating costs.” She adds, “But we are not a drama school theatre . . . Why should the university be funding arts and culture in Cape Town? It’s not their job.”

According to the most recent available figures, government money accounts for less than 1.5% of total income, and nearly all of that is earmarked for specific projects.

“All I’m lobbying for is R3 million,” says Foot.

No theatre complex in the world of the Baxter’s nature and size (three formal venues with a combined seating of 1453) can exist without significant subsidy.

According to Artscape’s 2010 annual report, it received R35.5 million from the Department of Arts and Culture, R1.18 million from the National Lottery Distribution Fund, and a further R2.2 million from local and other tax funded bodies.

Arstcape is no doubt fulfilling its particular mandate, whatever one’s criticisms of the policy they are implementing may be, but there is something distressing about seeing a complex like the Baxter, one of the country’s most vital cultural arenas, receiving trifling governmental support, while state funded theatres have over the years steadily declined in the quality and the volume of work put on, even though their subsidies as a percentage of revenue steadily climb.

Foot believes that funding should be linked to “measurables”, such as number of productions and audience attendance.

The M&G listings for the past 7 years show clearly that all three venues at Artscape are regularly empty, some for weeks on end, except for random events. The complex seems to be a venue for just about anything nowadays – belly-dancing workshops, whimsical exhibitions, film screenings, awareness concerts, scores of amateur productions, beauty and body building competitions. And Artscape is a positively vibrant institution when compared to PACOFS (R27.8 million government grant) and the Natal Playhouse.

By contrast, the Baxter is almost always busy with professional theatre.

The difficulty is to continue to present work for loyal Baxter patrons while growing new audiences.

Over the past decade, what were previously very clear identities for its various venues – the theatre, studio, and concert hall, each known for staging quality work within a specific market – have loosened considerably as managements cast their nets ever wider for shows that will bring audiences.

Foot’s innovation has been the Flipside, staging work backstage in the main theatre.

“In a very short time we have had shows that have been more integrated and younger,” she explains. “Dramas too big for the studio and too small for the main theatre go to the Flipside”. The first tryouts (such as Magnet Theatre’s Inxeba lomphilisi) were well received. She admits that the venue was a bit cold to start and asks that I assure readers the venue is now adequately heated.

She would like to do more drama. Ideally, she wants to set up a young repertory company of 12 actors. That would need R2 million to operate plus production budgets.

“We are also going to have a new venue, an 80-seater downstairs where films used to be shown. That will be more accessible . . . more young people.”

“The Baxter is growing in terms of its number of productions every year. . . Last year we did 1250 presentations.” (Artscape did 759).

Amongst the country’s leading artists, the Baxter is certainly a sought-after venue.

The Baxter’s figures are impressive: 400 000 visitors, including 73000 school children and a special programme that brought in 7800 senior citizens.

“We’re in the brochures for tourism, we’re internationally known. If we were to disappear we would be sorely missed by the people of Cape Town and by the city and by the province . . . And where would all these [theatre, dance, musical] companies be performing?”

“Ideally the city and province should step in. . . and the public need to tell the city that they want their theatre.”

Last year, the city and province provided R400 000.

“Operating grants are the money that we spend to keep this building open”, without which there is no theatre.

The Baxter’s operating budget is pretty lean at only R11 million.

“Are we nurturing a society with a culture or an economy with a swamp?” asks Foot.

The problem as Foot sees it is that most officials responsible at ministerial and executive levels are totally out of touch, “unaware of what is vital to our culture”. They don’t even know “who the companies are that have made the greatest contributions”. She compares it to herself being asked to pick the national cricket team.

However, notes Foot, “I think that the new CEO of the National Arts Council , Annabell Lebethe is the most promising news we have had in a long time.”

As for the National Lottery Distribution Fund, it is “incredibly slow, unhelpful, even when you do go and see them on a personal level.”

Compared to many of our state theatres, an examination of the Baxter’s most recent annual report and financials reveals a well-run, tightly staffed organization with impeccable governance.

But Foot is not looking to government for a lifeline. She hopes that local business and individuals “will become part of the Baxter family . . . people who believe and want to invest in what we do.”

The Baxter is commencing a massive drive for private sponsorships. “I want to connect directly”, she says.

Foot can be e-mailed directly on: Lara.Newton@uct.ac.za

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Interview with Sir Ian McKellen (published in the Mail & Guardian, August 2010)
Brent Meersman

Sir Ian McKellen is in Cape Town to perform in Samuel Beckett’s watershed tragicomedy, Waiting for Godot, at the Fugard Theatre. As we walk down the atmospherically lit corridor with its exposed brick and warm wooden floors, McKellen is touching the walls, the corners, as if reading Braille, almost fondling this magnificent old building. “The most beautiful theatre in the country,” I comment. “More than just this country,” he says.

Sir Ian, with his pale blue eyes and the handsome face of a character actor, is a fetching 71-year-old, despite having grown his hair and leaving it rather dishevelled for the part of the vagrant he is currently playing. His dress is bohemian too; more about comfort than fashionability.

He speaks measuredly, as you’d expect a knighted actor, one who has clearly absorbed much of the wisdom of the great playwrights he performs. So when he chooses to use the f-word (very occasionally) it has a particular impact.

Brent Meersman: It may come as a surprise to many South Africans that you have a relationship with this country, specifically the new South Africa. I first saw you in 1994 at the Theatre on the Bay.

Sir Ian McKellen: Sean [Mathias, the director] and I came as part of a group from the National Theatre of Great Britain in September 1994, and the [general] election had happened in April. This was the National Theatre’s thank you to the Market [Theatre]. I made a few connections, and one of the things we did on that occasion was to march. I think it was the second gay rights march in Johannesburg. Tony Sher and his partner Greg [Doran] and I made a banner saying ‘UK’, and we carried that; we were the UK representatives on the march. There was some abuse. So I felt a little bit part of South Africa.

Edwin Cameron was making a submission to get sexuality in the constitution as grounds on which you could not discriminate. I was invited back to do that show [A Knight Out], which I did at Camps Bay, Durban, and the Market [Theatre]. And on that trip, I went to lobby the new president [he smiles, pauses, and avoids saying Mandela], at the ANC headquarters with Simon Nkoli and Phumzile Mthethwa [he pronounces her name perfectly].

So, I have a big emotional connection with the country. I have come back here on holiday half a dozen times and when I was doing The Prisoner [TV mini-series]. But this is the first time I’ve been in a play here.

BM: By having yourself and Patrick [Stewart], the X-Men reunited in Godot [at the Haymarket Theatre, London], was there a conscious strategy to bring Beckett to the generation that dwells mostly in Middle Earth?

IM: It was all too good from a publicity point of view, wasn’t it? Some people do come to see Gandalf, and they’re not disappointed, because I have a beard. We’ve had some very young kids, 9-year-olds, who have dragged their parents along. I think you can bring kids to this, because it’s not complicated. A kid doesn’t have to keep asking what are they doing?

I think there must have been a lot of productions that tried to explain, had a running commentary going alongside the text. These guys [in Godot] have no job, not enough to eat, nowhere to live, and they are hoping their situation will improve; that’s the plot really; that’s not difficult.

BM: How is acting in film different from stage?

IM: There are many ways up the mountain, many ways of acting. One might involve ropes, one might involve just walking, but you’re still climbing up the mountain. I couldn’t act in any medium unless I was using my imagination and feeling what it would be like to be the person. On film, you have to do that in intense little bursts . . . in the moment that it is being filmed. So you must be feeling it, and being it, and sensing it, and you must not be presenting; the camera will observe what you’re doing and will then literally project it…In the theatre, you have to do more, and it’s more rewarding because of that. You’re more engaged – in every possible way. You have to be outside yourself as you are inside yourself, which you don’t have to do in cinema. . . A lot of filming is being ready for the moment when you have to do it. Theatre is one long take and no director in sight; just you and the audience. But you won’t be able to act in either medium unless your imagination is engaged.

BM: It seems the stentorian-voiced actor with the grand gestures is no longer believable. Perhaps our exposure to film is responsible. Stage acting, the best, have become more naturalistic.

IM: It has, yes. However, we have played this show in very large spaces, 1400 people, large for a Beckett play. The people in the front have to cope with you playing to the back, but that’s part of the experience of theatre. My own career has been a journey towards being as real as possible. David Garrick and [Richard] Burbage were praised for being very real, but we know they didn’t act the way we do. There are fashions in acting. It’s not enough just to behave, you can’t just be Gogo [Estragon in Godot], you have to present as well. Playing King Lear, you can’t just be an old man, because you’re speaking in verse. There’s something extra . . . Lear is not Coronation Street.

BM: But then you have ‘Godot’, which is something that can only be done on stage. You can’t film it.

IM: Yes, yes. Beckett was asked once to look at an excerpt of Godot on television, and he said, “No, no, no. My characters are trapped on the open space of the stage.” It’s full of that quirky awareness that the audience should have that they are watching a play. The play says yes, you are watching a play. Gogo looks at the audience and says, “Inspiring prospects. Let’s go.”

BM: What do you make of television?

IM: I’m intrigued by TV, but it has rather passed me by. It’s interesting how to act on television, and of course it’s being in people’s homes. Almost all TV now is film. There was a time when you had four cameras on you . . . a technical exercise. I’ve done quite a lot [Coronation Street, Rasputin, The Prisoner], but I’ve never quite understood it.

BM: Why do you act?

IM: Well I act now because it’s what I can do. I have learned how to do it, and I enjoy finding out more about it, and I’m not frightened of it; and it fascinates me. It’s more than a hobby, and not just a way of life either; it’s a craft really . . . as much as somebody who makes chairs; and I can make all sorts of different chairs.

I became an actor because I didn’t know how to do it, and that intrigued me . . . I came to acting through being an audience. My father knew the manager of the local variety theatre. I used to go and stand in the wings and watch these acts – comics, singers, animal performers, magicians. I tried to work out what happened when they stepped from the dark of the wings, from the dust and the misery really;[they were] not paid much, dreadful dressing rooms, awful digs. But, stepping into the light and transforming. Well, I wanted to be a part of that. I didn’t quite know how to do it, it seemed to me the most exciting thing a person could do.

I think that was mixed up with being gay. At the time I became an actor, it was illegal for me to make love. Therefore, there was a lot that was secret, but not on stage. There I could be open, and share my emotions, and draw attention to myself in a way that in real life I couldn’t; I had to deflect attention in case someone discovered the truth.

BM: I’ve always thought gay people often made good actors, because they knew from an early age how to play a part; the fear of discovery makes one very convincing.

IM: Yes, I think there must be a connection there. And I heard one could meet gay people in the theatre. There were no clubs or bars in Bolton [where McKellen grew up], no literature, no lesbian-gay society, no gay newspapers, nothing. But in the theatre I’d heard there were ‘queers’, and an atmosphere of acceptance that was not true of the rest of the world.

I became proud to be an actor. My proudest day was when I got my equity union card. I was part of a band now of people I admired; and I joined a club; it made me feel safe.

BM: In ‘Gods and Monsters’, Whale [McKellen’s character] says as a gay boy in a working class family he was like a giraffe harnessed to a plough. You however, were spared that?

IM: Yes. My parents admired actors. My father was worried I wouldn’t earn any money, so we agreed I’d try it for two years. I’m still trying [he smiles ironically]. It wasn’t thought odd by my family to be an actor.

BM: Hollywood seems as homophobic as ever, except for English actors. How does one address that prejudice?

IM: There are some young gay actors in Hollywood. The oddity is that if you cross the continent of America to New York, Tony Award winners are constantly thanking their boyfriends from the stage. What I have noticed about internalised homophobia is everyone thinks theirs is a special situation. I can’t come out as a politician, because no one will vote for me; I can’t come out as a teacher, because the parents will complain; I can’t come out as a actor because… Well the ‘because’ in Hollywood is that the advertisers on TV wouldn’t like it…But my film career took off only when I came out. So I don’t know, your life is better once you’re out.

BM: What they regret is not coming out.

IM: Absolutely, like me. Now Rupert Everett recently said he’d advise a young actor to consider not coming out, because their career will suffer . . . I say to young actors in Hollywood that if you are so mad to be in movies that you will lie about yourself, and live a lie, and constantly be hiding; is any career worth that? If you want to be in movies become an openly gay makeup artist, openly gay director, screenwriter manager, masseur, agent. They’re all there. It’s only the actors. Don’t ask don’t tell is an obscene instruction.

BM: Okay, the obligatory question: what’s next?

IM: There is the possibility still that The Hobbit will be made into two movies. But there is a finance problem, because MGM has collapsed . . . MGM is currently 133 bankers, and they all have to sign off on the bottom line.

I thought of working less regularly . . . but then hang on, the time will come when the pins give way and memory goes – it’s happening to people my age, they can’t work anymore. So whilst I can, why don’t I? . . . I was saying to Sean [Mathias], coming to this theatre, if this were in London within a bus ride of my home, I’d move in. I’d just like to work here; do plays. Would love that!

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Published in the Mail & Guardian, June 18, 2010

The nation was in raptures after the successful opening of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Sport is not alone in riding high on this optimism. The annual National Arts Festival (NAF) envisioned this global tournament as an opportunity for a bumper year. Giving football fans the benefit of the doubt – that they might have interests in fancy footwork other than dribbling and enjoy more musical pursuits than a cacophony of vuvuzelas – the festival is extending itself from 10 to 15 days, and starting earlier than usual (on June 20).

Commendably, the NAF wants to “showcase” (all four forwards by the principle stakeholders use the same word in the official programme) what South Africa’s artistically rich, financially strapped, multicultural arts have to offer the world, while the world is here.

For their efforts, they quite understandably hoped for some of the R150-million bounty allocated for arts and culture during the FIFA event, and applied for it. After all, as spectacular as the enormous dung beetle puppet rolling the soccer ball was (and it was wonderful) at the FIFA kick-off, the festival does provide a more comprehensive platform for advertising our broader civilized pursuits.

In addition to the unprecedented attention and a large foreign media contingent now scrambling for new angles on life in Africa, it seems various international impresarios, even some theatre critics, were lured to our shores for the first time thanks to the World Cup.

The NAF wanted a once-off R10-million grant; not for commissioning favoured artists, but for marketing the country’s resourceful talent and most importantly to create a lasting legacy project in the arts.

The Minister for Arts and Culture may be attending the opening ceremony, but to date the festival has not received any money from national government for this year. As is so often the case in the department’s grey finances, if a decision was made either way it appears not to have been communicated.

The National Lottery Distribution Fund has responded and are promising support for the next three years. Most of the tab has been picked up by the festival’s established sponsors.

Asked if staging a jumbo festival during the World Cup was their most brilliant or stupidest idea, Tony Lankester (CEO of the festival) replied: “Ask me in two weeks time.”

In the month prior to the festival, theatre producers throughout the country were unsure how to enter these unchartered waters. The NAF in its 36th year chose to grab the bull by the horns or rather the mascot Zakumi by the tail. At least there is no shortage of artists; between the combined main and fringe programmes are over 500 productions.

Logistically, these unchartered waters posed considerable challenges and expense. Equipment, such as marquees, and car hire were at a premium, and it was a battle to get technical crews, who are also asking prohibitive rates. The festival was stung by the airlines. Worried that they would not be able to get seats for their artists, the NAF booked tickets well in advance at then extortionate prices. Fares have now plummeted and there is capacity. The upside is that audiences need not fret about travel arrangements to get to the festival. Accommodation too is available, although the weekend of June 26 is heavily booked according to Lankester. Sales in comparison to previous years are very encouraging, he says.

One thing is sure, without the festival the World Cup largesse would have all but bypassed Grahamstown. The Eastern Cape hasn’t managed to attract any team base camps. The festival is laying on extra day trips and has shored up their marketing in Port Elizabeth, where four matches including a quarter-final are scheduled during the festival period.

Football does make a turn on the stage. The Football Diaries is an autobiographical “meditation on art and sport”, a solo performance by Ahilan Ratnamohan, a young, Sri Lankan-Australian player manqué. Football Football, performed by a cast from Italy, Singapore, Bosnia and Slovenia, explores “the art of football” through dance, theatre, video, music and special effects. The Giant Match is a street theatre production using 32 giant puppets to relate a South African version of Romeo and Juliet. In this allegory, the two young lovers are kept apart by a feud between their two families, culminating in a comic football match and a wedding.

Matches will of course be screened in Grahamstown; combing audiences and spectators, will make the festival a very special place to be during the World Cup.

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Click link for the review: Published in the Mail & Guardian June 4

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