David Isaacs and Oscar Petersen, the immensely popular Joe Barber boys (they have over 10 000 Facebook fans), return for their fifth show in 10 years. They quite correctly point out that some of us have grown grey temples watching them. The theme for their latest show – School Cuts – is about school reunions and reminiscences (their generation are in the vicinity of their 25th homecoming).
This time around, there seems to be more of Isaacs and Petersen as themselves than as their characters ¬– the beloved and localised commedia dell’arte style creations – Boeta Joe and Boeta Gamat, Gamat’s wife, Washiela, and the picaresque Outjies.
These folk heroes deliver their vernacular humour thick and fast. The material is funny, as are their shrewd observations, but crucially they are terrifically comical simply in the way they tell a yarn or throw away a line. They are far funnier than many of the stand-up comics currently doing the circuit. They have a theatricality and an alphabet of dramatic performance at their fingertips that lifts them a cut above the rest. A highlight includes a beautifully choreographed scene miming relay-running at the interschool athletics.
Directed by Heinrich Reisenhofer and with music by Jitsvinger, this show caps their last two, and marks in several ways a return to what made their invention so great in the first place.
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Based on a real barbershop in Parkwood, Joe Barber started in a 20-seat theatre in Tamboerskloof. Back in 1999, the theatre audience was mostly white, and the show was groundbreaking. It introduced a brand of dignified yet self-deprecating Cape humour and a range of characters vividly sketched from life on the Flats though never depicted before on stage.
Actor-creators Oscar Petersen and David Isaacs play Joe Barber and his friend Boeta Gamat, doubling as the neighbourhood skinderbek Washiela and the bergie-like Outjies.
Sold out seasons for eight years and a national tour later, they and their characters are household names. The show has moved from edgy commentary on social issues, then in a time of uncertain transformation, to a full blow commedia dell’arte celebration of local Cape culture. Joe Barber 3 felt like a karaoke television show for a life audience. Such popular success can become a millstone for artists as creative as Isaacs and Petersen. Last year they tried out a version of Dario Fo’s religious satire Mistero Buffo. One of the best things in the theatre last year, it flummoxed their mainstream audience.
The current incarnation (though supported by a tabloid) sees a return to content and reflects on local phenomena such as the break dancing era of the 1980s and the ‘Oblokke’ in Ocean View where evangelicals set up church tents.
The artifice the comic duo together with co-creator and director Heinrich Reissenhoffer still battle with is how to reinvent this sure-fire crowd-pleaser to take their audience to new horizons and keep themselves creatively nourished.
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Experts are baffled by the astonishingly high rate of addiction (making even the Eighties crack boom in the States seem slight) with which tik – methamphetamine – has blighted the local coloured community. After all, tik has been around the world since its discovery in Japan in 1919. It never took off until it landed in the Cape Flats. The answer to this riddle is artfully told in Oscar Petersen and Heinrich Reisenhofer’s SUIP! The poor and the homeless are predictably as impotent as they were ten years ago when SUIP! was first staged, but in this updated version, the focus has subtly shifted to a nameless young boy who hardly speaks a line, played with the necessary smoldering intensity by Travis Snyders. He has latched onto a troupe of derelict alkies. We first meet them busking for money and soliciting the audience. It’s a poignant dramatic conceit. As powerless as the destitute are to control their fate, they are also victims of the stereotyped images imposed upon them. Yet here, these bergies are deliberately clowning to the gallery, playing up the behaviour expected of them, to get their fix. Ivan Abrahams plays Shaun, the street sage, poet and narrator of the piece. This acutely observed part established Abrahams’s reputation. At one point, impersonating his former farmer-employer, with floppy hat and grizzly looks, he apes the face on the Oom Tas label – Distell’s urine-gold wine since 1952. By exploiting the legendary theatricality of the bergie, the cast delicately balance the proverbial and comic with the personal and tragic. However, the bergies’ celebrated turn of phrase is strangely shy in this script. Mary Daniels plays Shaun’s cohort, Rose, who maintains the dignity of the group by upholding the tribe’s code of conduct; Shaun Arnolds (Koffie) lurches about the stage with bum crack and buttocks exposed throughout; Ilse Oppelt, as the obdurate Sophie, gives an entertaining performance, but is the least convincing, not quite shedding her class. Percussionist Wonder Made accompanies the action with sensitivity and poise on found instruments, including empty bottles. Beneath what may be an award-winning set for its simplicity and eloquence – a gigantic stack of brown beer crates in the shape of Table Mountain with a box of wine representing the upper cable car station – the story of a system of generational addiction unfolds, and the sins of the fathers inexorably leads to the horrific conclusion, from dispossessed boozers to homicidal sociopaths.
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