Waiting for Godot (Little Theatre)

Photo: Guy de Lancey


Director Peter Hall recalled that when Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot opened in London it was greeted with derision and incomprehension by the critics. The story at least goes that critic Harold Hobson left the auditorium, but was persuaded to go back inside and trust the experience. Hobson then wrote a panegyric, and Beckett mania gripped London. Across the Atlantic, Brooks Atkinson wrote of Godot: ‘Theatregoers can rail at it, but they cannot ignore it. For Mr. Beckett is a valid writer’. The legendary critic Kenneth Tynan, required a few weeks to understand the work, but soon concluded: the play ‘forced me to re-examine the rules which had hitherto governed the drama; and having done so, to pronounce them not elastic enough.’ Beckett of course went on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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.”

May 21, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Comments Closed

Noah of Cape Town (Baxter)

Photo: Giovanni Sterelli

Photo: Giovanni Sterelli

As desert encroaches on Cape Town, nuclear waste leaks into the surroundings, seeds die in the ground, water is rationed to the populace while the country’s military authorities hoard supplies. and taxi associations run the city – these are the final days before the environmental apocalypse of 2020.

Noah of Cape Town is one of the most original works you are likely to see. In South Africa’s first solely a cappella musical, Graham Weir’s inspired compositions and beautiful lyrics are given magnificent expression by Amanda Tiffin’s arrangements for 16 voices.

With fine performances from (among others) Christine Weir, Eben Genis, Nqobile Sipamla, Gys de Villiers and Anton Luitingh, the result is a moving theatrical experience that stands head and shoulders above the clichéd, formula-driven, tired sounds of musicals the world over.

Dicky Longhurst’s ingenious, mobile set of metal triangles that assemble and disassemble, functions almost as a metaphor for the a cappella nature of the whole creation.

The at times over-written dialogue however is not as strong as the music, and the under-developed book, with the introduction of last minute love plots, suffers credibility problems largely because the environmental message is confused with mumbo jumbo, off the wall, New Age conspiracy theories, though these are nicely spoofed in second half by an officially sanctioned psychic fraud.

Producer Simon Cooper is to be congratulated on his courage and vision to stage this ambitious and extraordinary work.

July 12, 2009 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Closed

Artscape Spring New Writing Season 2008

Photo : Giovanni Sterelli.

Photo : Giovanni Sterelli.


After a bad start, this year’s Artscape Spring Drama Season of fully staged new South African plays concludes on a slightly better note with The Return by Fatima Dike. It is of course not unusual for a series of fresh works to have few successes. Even experienced outfits such as the National Theatre Studio go hopelessly wrong. But the problem locally is that the script mentoring process, which the Artscape New Writing Programme promises, is sadly not doing a good enough job. The works go to stage premature and obviously so.

In this critic’s opinion of the fifteen productions over the past four years only Beethoven in Raptus (written in 1981), Juliet Jenkin’s The Boy Who Fell from the Roof and Graham Weir’s Circus Sideshow are of note.

The season commenced with Dalliances. Not even innovative direction could rescue this one. A ludicrous plot, tissue-thin characters and dialogue riddled with clichés, this was an exercise in popular titillation as vacuous at the culture it pretended to anatomize.

It was followed by Wrestlers. Playwright Milton Schorr is an original thinker, but someone needed to point out the old adage that naturalistic dialogue is the way people speak but with all the boring bits cut out. The trivial did not become more meaningful.

The Return covers well trodden ground, constructing the barest of excuses for delivering cultural notes (greatly enjoyed by the American exchange students on the night I attended).

Overall, the playwrights have a weak sense of the theatrical. Plays are not television episodes on stage, where soap opera formats dominate and psychobabble substitutes for characterisation. The mentors need to be tougher and the playwrights will have to demonstrate greater commitment to their art. Premature professional stagings help neither. Let’s hold thumbs for 2009.

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

Merchant of Venice (Maynardville)

The Merchant of Venice is an anti-Semitic play in which Shylock, the Jew, is an avaricious, cunning and heartless devil. Even his own daughter deserts him to become a Christian. The famous speech “Hath not a Jew eyes?…If you prick us, do we not bleed?” is easily played to opposite effect and was so construed until the late 19th century. Furthermore, the comedy, which requires a happy ending, depends upon this villainous reading.

However, the durability of Shakespeare arises from his characters containing sufficient ambiguity to allow for divergent interpretations. There is enough in Shylock for a skilful actor to inveigle a sympathetic portrayal mitigating the prejudice the play promotes. And Jeremy Crutchley is everything one wants in such a Shylock. His performance is studied, nuanced and moving, and his Shylock’s humiliation a masterclass in achieving dramatic impact. Graham Weir, as the merchant Antonio, is a perfect counterpart, as refined and controlled. The two play exceptionally well off one another.

In countering the anti-Semitism a director may also elect to recontextualise the play for instance in 1943 during the Shoah, as Roy Sargeant has, and many modern productions now do. Sargeant also has Tubal, a Jew and friend of Shylock, prominently present in the court leaving as if disapproving of Shylock, making the latter’s merciless obduracy the actions of an individual not the race. There are no such directions in Shakespeare’s text; Tubal is last mentioned in Act 3. Sargeant also adds a final scene with swastika banners in which German soldiers pin the yellow star to Shylock.

Ironically, the Merchant was actually staged in 1943 by the SS in Vienna to celebrate the successful deportation to death camps of all the Jews in the city. Shylock was played by Goebbels’s favourite Werner Krauss.

Merchant is supposed to be a comedy, but once the tragedy of Shylock is admitted, the comedy collapses. Shylock’s humiliation all but ends the play; for what do we now care about the workings out of petty love intrigues amongst a bunch of selfish and vain Fascists. This fault line is exacerbated by the vast gap between Crutchley and Weir’s naturalism, and the uninspiring leads (Clayton Boyd as Bassanio and Tessa Jubber as Portia) with their supporting cast who with a few exceptions (such as John Caviggia) are over the top, vulgarised, comic mummers. The tragedy of Shylock is a must-see; the comedy of the Merchant hard going.

January 25, 2008 | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed

Letter from Patient Essop (Intimate)

Essop1Essop2
The Spanish master, Francisco Goya, declared in his Los Caprichos etching series, “the sleep of reason brings forth monsters”. In the hands of an accomplished artist, such sleep awakens poetic genius. Graham Weir, celebrated as artistic high priest of a capella group Not the Midnight Mass, has returned to his original and riveting one-man musical drama, Letters from Patient Essop.

Essop visits Larvington Manor, an asylum, where 15 years before, stricken by the misery and corruption of the world, he had sequestered himself. Using projections of discarded photographs Weir found in junk shops, narrated extracts from Essop’s letters to his physician and powerful songs that lyrically express his inner turmoil, Essop charts the trajectory of his recovery, producing a richly textured collage of existential angst.

While teetering over the abyss with Essop on a tightrope of stretched nerves, we catch relief in the black comedy of Essop’s fellow inpatients, played convincingly by Sven Goldin and Simon Ratcliffe, who double as the musicians.

It is not simply that Weir’s voice is well trained, but he is naturally blessed with a pleasing timbre, as revealed by the recording, played during the production of Weir singing soprano at the tender age of ten.

Letters is a timely reminder that the expression of pain can be beautiful, and attending art of this calibre is the essential physician of the soul.

December 14, 2007 | Tags: | Comments Closed

A Circus Sideshow (Artscape Arena)

Photographer : Giovanni Sterrelli

Photographer : Giovanni Sterrelli


Without a doubt, Graham Weir is one of our most gifted and daring composers. What’s more, he is still blossoming. His latest creation, A Circus Side Show, bears his inimitable style, and shows him mastering increasingly complex musical forms. It’s also a treat to see Christine Weir back on stage in Cape Town and vocally stronger than ever.

Set in the dusty South African hinterland during the 1940s, Side Show trails Jack’s ramshackle, part circus, part freak show as they barnstorm the rural towns.

Owner and sword-swallower Jack, played by the towering Adrian Galley, does his best to keep it together against hostile locals, storms and internal wranglings. But the real unifier is the compassionate Franco (Graham Weir), a character physically modelled on the pinheads in MGM’s 1932 film Freaks.

Side Show is about beauty on the inside beyond appearance, poignantly captured by those physically unusual singing exquisitely. The Übermensch in this scheme is a contemptuous Russian acrobat, Marek (in Superman red and blue) a part for which Richard Lothian has had to learn some gymnastic skills, and with whom everyone is slightly in love. Most especially the dwarf Pinky, portrayed with gravitas by Rory Avenstrup (from Paljas), who drowns her unrequited love and some darker secrets in alcoholic binges.

Director Megan Choritz and designer Dicky Longhurst have captured a suitably eccentric atmosphere. Weir’s collaborator and musical director, Amanda Tiffin, has created evocative arrangements, at first carnival music that recalls the movie tunes of Nino Rota, steadily becoming wilder with gypsy violins as the passions rise.

Side Show isn’t as cleanly structured as Weir’s one-man musical Letter from Patient Essop. The book needs shoring up. Weir’s innovative musical compositions, his refreshing treatment of difficult themes, several priceless comic moments, and across the board engaging performances makes this, like all Weir’s work, something out of the ordinary.

October 26, 2007 | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed

Songs of Hangings and Redemptions (Kalk Bay)

The best way to see Graham Weir’s latest musical performance is to sit with your eyes closed. There is brilliance and precision in his vocals these days. But listen carefully and another quality starts to emerge. There was always a gnostic element to Weir’s work, yet this time around the ballads selected for Songs of Hangings and Redemptions brings his spiritual nature particularly to the fore.

Although the lyrics touch upon justice and outrage, dwell on the defiance of the guilty and the resignation of the innocent, their sentiment is primarily informed by the mental clarity the proximity of death brings. One would expect a show about rough justice and mob lynching, about foolhardiness as often as it is about betrayal and vindictiveness, to be dark and harrowing, but Weir rewardingly treats the material with empathy, humanity and unexpected gentleness.

This redemptive element is reinforced by versatile musos Pitchie Rommellaere and Simon Ratcliffe who accompany Weir’s singing and percussion with soulful musical arrangements.

Weir spent much time in the Cape Town and Wynberg public libraries sourcing sheet music and listening to old vinyl records. Led Zeppelin once did Gallows Pole, and Amazing Grace and Tom Dooley are well known, but many of the songs will be unfamiliar to most. Some songs stretch back as far as the fifteen hundreds, and range in origin from the Scottish Mc Pherson’s Farewell to the American spiritual Canaan Land. Weir’s quirky, mischievous humour – which is never far away – is present in the words he has set to The Devil Didn’t Die Today.

Interspersed with the songs are brief monologues, topped and tailed by Weir’s original text about a set of new gallows going up in his narrator’s town, and extracts from William Faulkner’s Light In August and John Steinbeck’s The Vigilante. Director Megan Chortiz has ensured that the links to the songs are cohesive and natural.

As further encouragement to go, a particularly good menu accompanies the show. Although Weir is conscientiously vegetarian, the Kalk Bay kitchen’s seared tuna and roast fillet are a substantial incentive.

November 3, 2006 | Tags: , | Comments Closed