Poet, author and 1980s UDF activist, Chris van Wyk’s childhood memoir, Shirley, Goodness and Mercy, is adapted for the stage by Janice Honeyman. Apart from bringing a commendable and eloquent book to a wider audience, there isn’t much else going for this endeavour as theatre.
If you can stomach two hours of adults playing cutesy children and babies with dummies in their mouths – in that cutesy way adults play children and babies – then you are with the mawkish majority and will find this a charming entertainment.
Van Wyk’s story is narrated simultaneously by Zane Meas as the adult Chris and Christo Davids (Booitjie and the Oubaas) as ‘Little Chris’. Story telling theatre is dramatically a weak technique. The script, notably his tribute to his mother, is beautifully written, but could do with pruning. For example, in a particularly poignant moment, Van Wyk discovers that his ouma is illiterate, although she pretends to help him choose a book. Not content to simply tell us the story and then illustrate it, the event is also explained to us.
The first half deals with Chris’s early years growing up in the coloured township of Riverlea, where he still lives. Honeyman’s stated intention is to show “we are all the same inside”. Indeed, the story could as easily be about a poor white Afrikaans family. The point has been made elsewhere that Van Wyk is a black consciousness writer, yet this consciousness is strangely absent from the production. That the Van Wyk family were politically radically different from their conservative neighbours is only lightly touched upon and papered over with nostalgia. In the 1994 election, Riverlea voted overwhelmingly for the National Party, and even in 1999, less than one in four voted for the ANC.
The second half, which explores a lone Chris battling the apartheid security forces, lapses into a perfunctory chronology of events. Narrated from the stage, this is marginally more moving than reading the newspapers or any ghastly chronicle. Read the book.
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Athol Fugard’s latest play is about the irresistible compulsion to tell one’s story in order to obtain release. The same compulsion seems to have taken hold of Fugard for he has blandly adapted a short story from his collection Karoo and Other Stories for the stage. It is the story of a certain Booitijie Barends he knew in his beloved Karoo town of Nieu Bethesda.
‘Booitjie’ is an uncommon (even bizarre) spelling of the diminutive ‘boykie’ or ‘boytjie’. In the play, Booitjie explains that “because I was small I ended up ‘booitjie’ and now no one calls me by my real name”.
Set in the 1950s, the ‘non-white’ Barends (Christo Davids) is nurse and carer for the farm’s oubaas (Marius Weyers) now debilitated by a stroke. In typical Fugardian imagery, it is as if the patriarch is “a big bloekomboom” struck by lightning.
Early on, the two men enjoy a moment of bonhomie, an intimacy rarely found across the racial strictures of that time. But the oubaas needs more: to confess his terrible secrets. As he says, “You don’t need God to judge you and send you to hell. You can do it to yourself.” Unlike Soekie Fortuin (Mary Daniels), the day nurse, who is far more candid about how things stand, the compassionate Barends has “learned to understand” the oubaas.
In the end, the two men are able to put aside the apartheid appellations of ‘booitjie’ and ‘oubaas’ introducing themselves as Gerhardus Daniel Lottering Strydom and Adam Barends. With understanding comes equality of respect and acceptance.
Despite the compelling clarity in the writing, it would have been far better for Fugard to dramatise the story with a full cast, rather than only dramatize the story telling. The vision and horizons for our theatre keep shrinking. Yet having the story related in this manner mitigates the melodrama – miscarriage and paralysis, plotting murder and family suicide, an illegitimate pregnancy through incestuous adultery are among Strydom’s secrets.
The only truly dramatic conceit – which many patrons didn’t understand – is the gentle transition Weyers makes until we are hearing the oubaas as Barends does – not the slurred murmurings in the opening scene caused by the left-brain stroke.
It is a function of theatre to give the audience a catharsis; it is a misconception of drama to try to make a play out of pontificating about this necessity.
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