Trophies from Eden (Anna Louw)
Trophies from Eden (Steven Afrikaner)
A Place in the Sun (Mathilda Joseph)
Dr Fischer’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Marcelinus Swartbooi, Josef van der Westhuizen, Chris Nekongo, Avril Nuuyoma)
The Age of Enlightenment - Angelo Soliman (Lamin Jammeh)
Ready Mades / Found Objects: 1. Gambian 2. Cameroonian 3. Ghanaian 4. Nigerian.
Survival of the Fittest (Marcus Omofuma Nigerian by Ken Paul Chukwunonye)
Vevangua Muondjo The Hat Maker
Photo: Guy de Lancey
Well-known South African author Damon Galgut will direct Beckett’s landmark play with a dream team cast: David Isaacs as Estragon; Oscar Petersen as Vladimir; Martin le Maitre as
Pozzo; Graham Weir as Lucky.
Galgut, who has over the years steeped himself in Beckett’s oeuvre, says that the writer “makes complete sense to me, and the intellectual theorising that goes on around his work often leaves me perplexed”.
According to Galgut, Beckett is “a writer who gave embodiment to his internal psychic landscape, which is why he is so insistent that the nature and texture of his work should not be changed in the staging. It’s a wish I’m happy to respect, because inside those parameters quite a latitude of interpretation is still possible.
As director, Galgut intends to, play up “the broader elements of characterisation – the slapstick, the comic patter between the characters, the timing – as well as the anguish of the aimless waiting. It’s called a tragicomedy, so the two poles should both be present, the despair as well as the humour. Beckett is very funny when he’s played seriously.”
Galgut notes that one of the earliest productions was in a prison in the United States – “the physical aspects of the play – the broken-down bodies, the endless state of waiting – were immediately intelligible to the audience. For obvious reasons, I guess. But the same applies to almost any audience. We’re all waiting for Godot, whether we know it or not.”
Christine Weir and Godfrey Johnson’s Tainted Love is the perfect cabaret show for this tiny, new basement venue on the fringe of Green Point’s alternative ghetto; it feels like an underground club in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.
With songs such as Masochism Tango (Tom Lehrer), Hanky Panky (Stephen Sondheim), Tainted Love (Marc Almond) and Fuck you very much (Lilly Allen), they explore love in its kinkier dimensions, from playful sadomasochism (Have you waxed your crack? by Johnson and Weir) to Sapphic love (I Kissed a Girl by Katie Perry). It’s on the light and funny side, and you’d have to be quite a prude to be offended.
Choreographer Fiona du Plooy, who made an impression in the camp country and western cabaret Angels on Horseback last year, directs. The fingerprints of that show are evident here.
Johnson and Weir make a superb double act. They are top-drawer performers, with Weir’s exceptional vocal talents and Johnson’s (who sings too) musical versatility. On stage, they have natural comic reciprocity, their witty repartee carried with aplomb into the cheeky and sometimes tricky choreography.
One hopes this will be the start of wonderful duo and great things to come.
Photo: Aryan Kaganof
As David Kramer and Taliep Petersen’s musical Ghoema some years ago set out to reclaim a Cape musical heritage largely written out of authorized history during apartheid, Afrikaaps is a new theatrical edutainment fighting for the recognition of how Afrikaans developed as a Dutch creolized language amongst coloured speakers outside of this white hegemony.
The first written Afrikaans was as phonetic Arabic script translations of the Qur’an over 200 years ago. The Bible was only translated into today’s official Afrikaans in 1933.
The extremely talented young cast under the direction of Catherine Henegan seeking to set the record straight are hip-hop poet Jitsvinger, singer, actor and dancer Moenier Adams, singer and poet Blaq Pearl, hip-hop artist and activist Emile Jansen, rapper and break-dancer Bliksemstraal, accompanied by composer, pianist and jazz prodigy Kyle Shepherd and musician Shane Cooper. They make a superb ensemble.
Employing music, poetry, dance, skits, documentary and interview video footage, they get their message across in a clear and humorous way. Henegan has dressed the show well, but the shape is problematic, without a coherent trajectory. Ironically, although dealing with ‘gam taal’ and street talk, it feels oddly cerebral and emotionally disinvested. Perhaps, it’s because the very good-looking cast are all male, except for Pearl. One of the principle cast members having to drop out at the last moment didn’t help.
But without a doubt this show is full of rewards and should be seen. So: “Aweh my bru! Koppel die lyne” (Hey! Spread the word).
Photo: Ruphin Coudyzer
Athol Fugard’s latest play, The Train Driver, which had its world première here, is his most intriguing since the advent of democracy. It is not as resolved a work as Exits and Entrances; it suffers the same monologue-heavy, undramatic radio play quality of Booitjie and the Oubaas, but it is braver, less contrived, far more on target than either Victory or Coming Home. It is also ingenious.
Roelf Visagie (Sean Taylor) is a train driver with post-traumatic stress disorder after a black woman with her baby strapped to her back committed suicide by placing herself under his engine. The true story on which this is based is even more horrific. The suicide (Pumla Lolwana) took two more children with her, one of whom she pulled back on to the tracks when the child tried to escape. Perhaps this created too many moral ambiguities for Fugard, but Roelf (and Fugard) is strangely neglectful on the dimension the death of the infant should bring; his beef is with the mother. Tracking down her body to confront her ghost leads Roelf to a Godforsaken graveyard outside Motherwell, where Simon Hanabe (Owen Sejake) buries the unclaimed corpses of the nameless. Packs of feral dogs and equally ferocious gangs of dehumanised young men prowl the area.
The characterisation of Simon is rudimentary and uncomfortable; he is the familiar, epigrammatic rustic with a common sense that is at once comical and full of wisdom. His dynamic with Roelf often feels antediluvian, but Sejake has a gigantic stage presence and is utterly compelling.
For his part, Taylor is hammy, and when Roelf mentally breaks down early on, Taylor elicits laughs. Very oddly, Roelf keeps bursting into Afrikaans and then translating in English; it rings false, destroying our suspension of disbelief. Taylor these days seems to have a hard enough time just doing a South African accent. The play would be stronger in Afrikaans, with Roelf speaking in his mother tongue.
But the ingenuity of The Train Driver lies in that collision between the unstoppable subject and its immovable object. What Fugard has uniquely articulated for us at last, like no other playwright, is the dilemma of white guilt and its existential anguish; the counterintuitive truth that we are responsible for the destruction we cause but over which we have no control.
The Famished Road on at the KKNK 2010
This year, some 35 productions will premiere at the festival, including several site-specific works.
Among the works the festival highlights are: Marita van der Vyver’s Vergenoeg adapted as a musical, staring Sandra Prinsloo, Milan Murray and Alexa Strachan; Yasmina Reza latest play, God of Carnage, translated into Afrikaans and directed by Hennie van Greunen; Betésda staged at the municipal swimming-pool with Nicola Hanekom, Nicole Holm, Bronwyn van Graan, Grant Swanby, Eben Genis and Neels van Jaarsveld; the drag queen duo Mince will for the first time be at the festival with Mincing in die Klein Karoo; Die proponentjie celebrates playwright Pieter Fourie’s 70th birthday; a brand new open-air amphitheatre on the Jamstreet farm will open with Chris Barnard’s Taraboemdery; Arthur Miller’s Dood van ‘n verkoopsman in a new translation directed by Bobby Heaney; Gary Gordon’s First Physical Theatre Company have created So loop ‘n volstruis. More than half of the theatre shows on the programme are comic dramas, farce or stand-up comedy.
It would appear that festival CEO, Brett Pyper, who took over the reins a couple of years ago, and his team are successfully reinvigorating the festival on several fronts.
Photo: Igor Polzenhagen
Remix aim to bring together more and more differently-abled performers (some of them are wheelchair dependent) onto South African stages and to develop integrated dance locally. They recognise that each person’s body holds their personal as well as their social history. The company seeks, through its work, to simultaneously entertain, educate, and challenge attitudes and policies in the human rights area, in particular, social and cultural attitudes towards dance, gender and disability. Audience development within the disabled communities where access is difficult is a particular concern.
The five-member, full-time company comprises Malcolm Black, Lee-anne Meyer, Nadine Mckenzie, Andile Vellem and Marlin Zoutman. Ina Wichterich-Mogane directs Lovaffair, with Nadine Mckenzie as assistant to the director; choreography is by the company. Adding another dimension are actor, director and composer Bongile Mantsai and performer Chuma Sopotela.
Remix has built a good reputation for innovative and quality work, and several of their productions can be regarded as groundbreaking for South Africa.
Photo: Christine Gouws
Young playwright Nicholas Spagnoletti has made a notable debut with London Road, his first fully produced play (and a nice coup too to have Lara Bye direct).
As someone who lived for a while in the actual London Road in Sea Point, and watched it almost disintegrate in the 1990s and then regenerate, I can vouch for the veracity of the work. The text is a pleasant mix of inventive comedy and tragedy, familiar and resonant for many local theatre patrons.
In a series of short vignettes (the entire duration is just under 60 minutes), it charts the friendship to fruition of two unlikely soul mates brought together by their determination to triumph over circumstance: Rosa (Robyn Scott), a young, illegal immigrant and drug peddler, and Stella (Ntombi Makhutshi), a lonely, elderly Jewish widow whose family has emigrated.
Although Makhutshi gives a fine, nuanced, and well-judged performance, Scott tends to dominate, mostly because the script is unbalanced; Rosa is far more realised as a role. Scott is as always reliably comic (Rosa would fit in perfectly as one of NBC TV’s The Golden Girls), yet touchingly vulnerable as the frailties of age overtake her character. The characters themselves are fresh; the scenario novel yet quite plausible; and Spagnoletti has both a good ear for dialogue and a camp sense of humour.
Overall, it is one of the better straight play texts (in the sense that it is a dramatic dialogue for actors) seen in a while in Cape Town. This is indeed promising new work.
http://www.outtheboxfestival.com/
The Out the Box festival, which consists of an adult, family and film programme, as well as workshops and talks, has moved from September (a month itself filled with art events, such as the unique and only one of its kind in the world, Voorkamer performing arts festival) to March, where it is in good company with the pioneering Infecting the City public arts festival.
Out the Box (OTB) focuses on ‘visual performance’, on collaborative and experimental works that dissolve the boundaries between performance and visual art. Several of the works are site specific. Included in the line-up for the Adult Festival this year are international performance artists and contemporary dancers: Duda Paiva (Netherlands) with Angel; Edna Jaime (Mozambique) with her provocative work (Eu) peca de terra-II; Baba Yaga Theatre (Denmark) with Inua; Benjamin Vandewalle (Belgium) with Skindsideout. From Tel Aviv, Israel, comes The Avital Dvory Visual Theatre Company’s magical realist piece Tranquila, integrating theatre, circus arts, puppetry, clowning and music. The organizers are quick to add that they support “peace through cultural exchange” and “do not host artists as a political statement . . . we are in negotiations with Palestinian puppeteers to attend OTB in 2011”.
Among the local works are Quack!, Acty Tang’s Inscrutable, and Mothertongue Theatre’s The Baggage of Bags, as well as several intriguing new works by emerging theatre makers.
The festival is staged at the Baxter Theatre and in various venues on Hiddingh Campus, Orange Street.
Ticket prices are very reasonable (R35 for family festival shows) and there are various discounts and multi-pass options.
Book early at Computicket.
