The Emancipation of Arney (Kalk Bay)

ArneyDespite an action brought to the Constitutional Court in 2000 by 196 private Christian schools claiming Proverbs (23:14): “Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell” – corporal punishment remains illegal in our schools. Theatre practitioner, mime and clown, Aldo Brincat, who now lives in Botswana, says today his long-haired son cannot believe children were once beaten over trivialities. In The Emancipation of Arney, a humorous and quirky schoolboy memoir set in the 1980s, Brincat revisits those uneducated times.

Using paper masks to bring to life each of his characters, the trials of life start with a lesson on sex education, a travesty performed with a condom and a carrot. As a result, the sadistic headmaster Mr Schweitz perversely gets off on caning buck-toothed Arney van der Merwe, whose bushy black eyebrows and a pronounced accent weirdly reminds one of Justice Sachs (who also happened to deliver the unanimous court decision mentioned above).

The caricature masks, which start from the upper-lip, are startlingly realistic yet highly theatrical and stylized. Brincat, who demonstrates an extraordinary respect for his props, inhabits them with almost animistic power. His body and his gestures, the tenor of his voice, become exceptionally expressive. The effect is to cartoon and yet convince.

It’s a coming of age story with Arney negotiating childhood romance, school bullying, awkward father-son talks, and the realization that everyone wears a disguise of some sorts, often to protect a fragile interior.

Tightly scripted, economical and vividly capturing the schoolboy patois of the day, Arney is deep in pathos and empathy for the kindhearted, ordinary man, preserving his dignity and empathy for others in a frequently brutalizing world.

April 20, 2007 | Tags: | Comments Closed

Moron than Off (Kalk Bay)

Durban-based playwright and theatre practitioner Aldo Brincat has returned to Cape Town with his playful, well-established show Moron Than Off. The somewhat hokey title is misleading. Brincat is an original energy and as renewable as the timeless clowns of the silent movies — Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy — from whom he says he borrows.
He enters in a black peacoat — lumbering and shaven headed — a nod to Uncle Fester of the Addams Family. The simple addition of bright washing-up gloves on hands and one on his foot, transforms him into a comic object and an alien force. He uses his main prop — a rusty old saw — to cut between sketches, returning intermittently to the well-worn mime of chasing and swallowing a fly — as perfected by Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean.
Brincat clearly delights in audience contact. Almost immediately, he sets about destroying the fourth wall and sniffing out his “victims”. Members of the audience become the foils for our shared comedy. Throughout, there are no spoken words, only articulate sounds. It is highly risky to do this, but Brincat is a magical stage manager — achieving cooperative fun while keeping the experience edgy by transgressing convention and the dreary strictures of decorum.
Brincat’s creature produces a sock puppet and other visual gags from a suitcase and a box, labelled respectively: “fragile” and “danger”. It is between these two dramatic poles — of sensitivity and threat — that his comedy operates. Like a pre-socialised child, he revels in anything slimy — false teeth, raw eggs and he even eats spaghetti out of an old boot. Nor is Brincat afraid to bleed for his art. In order not to spoil the joke, I can only mention here that some of his capers might not be out of place on something akin to Fear Factor.

April 27, 2006 | Tags: | Comments Closed