Vleis, Rys & Aartappels Festival (Artscape)

Smag
For all the complaints one hears from some Afrikaans theatre practitioners, Afrikaans theatre has probably never been healthier. Unfettered by the censorship and conservatism of the past and equally free of the pressure to rebel, Afrikaans dramatists are eagerly exploring their boundaries. In this new dispensation, they appear at least less ideologically encumbered than their English counterparts who have fallen to what Mike van Graan has called the “theatre of conformity” or the overtly commercial.

Afrikaans theatre has blind spots of its own and can be insular. But this is a charge one could hardly raise against the prolific and dynamic creative team of Vleis, Rys & Aartappels – South Africa’s leading Afrikaans theatre company.

Established in 2001 by talented writer and determined producer Saartjie Botha together with ingenious, veteran theatre director Marthinus Basson and new blood Jaco Bouwer, they now have no less than 56 productions and theatre projects under their belt.

Their oeuvre of the past two years is currently on show in a unique festival at the Baxter Sanlam Studio (see Listings for details). Attention to design, solid scripting, thorough-paced direction and virtuoso performances characterise the work. The keystone production is ’n Lang dagreis na die nag (Andre Brink’s translation of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Days’ Journey into Night) featuring Marius Weyers and Antoinette Kellermann.

It is well worth attending as many of these fully staged productions as possible, especially if you too have tired of on the one hand commercial pandering and on the other hand half-realised work with shoddy production values, amateur acting and premature script development, ubiquitously on offer in our local English language theatre.

The company’s name ‘Meat, Rice & Potatoes’ might indicate a staple diet, but this particular troupe has courageously got their act together and are presenting a rare feast for the theatre lover.

August 14, 2008 | Tags: , , , , , | Comments Closed

London Theatre September 2007

The Emperor Jones (Olivier, National Theatre)

Thea Sharrock’s restaging of her acclaimed production (at The Gate Theatre) of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones in the massive Olivier Theatre is beautifully designed and fills the space effortlessly.

Brutus Jones (played by risen star Paterson Joseph who is also in Saint Joan in repertory), escaped convict and murderer, establishes himself as a self-styled emperor and kleptocrat on a Caribbean island taxing and lauding over the “bush niggers”. Facing a revolt, he decides to flee the island. Lost in the forests, exhausted and frightened, Jones sees the ghosts of the men he has done wrong and in what is the most powerful scene, finds himself auctioned in a phantasmal slave market.

The subject matter of the play is as pertinent today as it was then. O’Neill used Haiti’s dictator Henri Christophe (who like Joes eventually committed suicide with a silver bullet) as inspiration. The staging in its day was revolutionary. When the production went on a road tour in the 1920s, death threats from the Ku Klux clan stopped its performance any further south than Norfolk. However, the theatrical devices have not weathered as well, and are today decidedly creaky. The play is eighty per cent soliloquy. Joseph plays the part in exaggerated period style as a Southern Negro. Perhaps historically accurate, though the imprecise accent once again interferes with verisimilitude, the effect edges on clowning. As a result, the terrified Jones is often comic – a buffoon. As he is stripped of his trappings, we come no closer to empathy for the man, except perhaps in the slave scene.

The action is accompanied by musicians, but the instruments are all electronically amplified, so that the drumming is more like a recorded soundtrack than a live performance. South Africans will find the effect particularly feeble. So too, the witch doctor, who has as much credibility for an African audience as the Simba chip lion.

Mention must be made of Robin Don’s brilliant revolving stage design, and superb lighting effects by Neil Austin.

September 13, 2007 | Tags: | Comments Closed

Begeerte (Baxter)

Begeerte

When Eugene O’Neill wrote Desire Under the Elms (1924) – the story of a father and son pitted against each other, and the neurotic love between a young bride and her step-son that culminates in infanticide – he looked to the Greek legends of Medea and Oedipus. His character’s self-destructive, murderous passions and naïve declarations of undying love are today the stuff of melodrama rather than the ‘unflinching realism’ of rural life they were perceived as portraying to the New Yorkers of the 1920s. The play is still far less performed than say his Long Day’s Journey Into Night, as the kind of amour fou it depicts has been generally supplanted by a more cynical, if sensible approach to the vagaries of the human heart.

But along comes Nerina Ferreira’s seamless adaptation and masterful translation into accessible, yet poetic Afrikaans. She has (among various prudent changes) replaced the entire action of the first three and half scenes with a single monologue; she has reduced the cast of five and bit parts to only three; and she has transposed the setting from 1850s New England to a bleak remote platteland plaas where soliloquy and relentless melodramatic action seems natural amongst the stony ground and its isolated, obsessing characters. The melodrama is suddenly believable.

However, it seems the ossified Old Testament patriarch – embodied in Ephraim Cabot (Marius Weyers) – has been unseated both on and off stage in democratic South Africa. When he bursts into prayer immediately after coitus with “God forgive me”, belly laughs followed at his verkrampte double standards. Yet the archetype is still compelling.

Jan Ellis is outstanding as the smouldering caged male animal Eben, with all the sexual energy of a Brando, even if somewhat inauthentically costumed in trendy jeans and white vest that strengthens the reference. It is good to see this fine actor back on the Cape Town stage after a considerable absense.

Anna-Mart van der Merwe, one of our keurigste actresses is an inspired choice as the backveld Abbie. She has been praised for her wonderful make-over as a ‘slut’, presumably because she seduces both father and son. But this is of course a radically male chauvinist construction and a hopeless misreading of both O’Neill and van der Merwe’s performance. She is a passionate woman in terrible circumstances, who is prepared to do anything, including sacrificing her only chance at material gain, for nothing but love. Van der Merwe succeeds in a similar way Sophia Loren did in her Hollywood debut in the same role in Delbert Mann’s 1957-film version. Incidentally, Anthony Perkins – who played opposite her as Eben – gave one of his best film performances, before he became typecast.

Janice Honeyman’s direction is stark and uninhibited. On opening (and I was told on the preview nights as well) the audience became nervous and coy. Whereas hick middle America was scandalised by the moral outrages of O’Niell’s ‘morbid plumbing’, our apparently sophisticated urbanites of today received the nudity and sexual explicitness of Begeerte with immature giggles.

It is an excellent production – thanks to strong performances and Ferreira’s exceptional dramaturgy. As a result O’Niell’s work has been given a renewed lease and Begeerte has the feel of a play belonging to the bekroonde Afrikaans canon.

May 5, 2006 | Tags: , , , , , | Comments Closed