Every time I go to the Intimate Theatre, I become fonder of the place. On entering to see John Hunt’s latest play, Maybe Sunshine Up Ahead, I had an uncanny sense of déjà vu that I was back in the People’s Space, famous for its politically charged works criticising apartheid, and which I frequented as a school boy. Perhaps it was the set – a baby-pink car wreck centre stage. Director Adam Neil and designer Marcel Meyer have dressed the play up well, patches of blue sky hang like sheets of torn metal, the car seems to leak red blood on to a resin floor in flesh-coloured tones. Clearly, we are entering a metaphorical space.
Adam Neill Productions must certainly be complimented on their innovative use of sponsorship and their sophisticated marketing. They plan to travel with the show – stated rather vaguely in the programme notes – to “Kyelitsha (sic) and then on to Stellenbosch or Paarl” – as a kind of touring political debate. And that is pretty much the sum of what the show amounts to in conception.
The programme notes tell us further that the play’s themes are “being debated on a continuous and daily basis on the radio, in print media and, notably in…local and national government…at social gatherings, amongst work-peers and within families….The play brings focus to these debates by presenting some of the human experiences that spawn them”. It’s that last bit – an admission of what we expect from drama – that points to a problem with the conception of Maybe Sunshine.
Essentially, the play operates as a metaphorical commentary, but falls short on a dramatic level. The car wreck with its green, red and yellow tyres strewn about it acts as an obvious metaphor for the imperfect vehicle in which we must travel as we journey towards the new South Africa. But it isn’t as compelling a device as for example the ‘Son of the Soil’, a similarly metaphorical vehicle used by Andrew Whaley in his recent (similarly) political discourse of a play Rolling Heads (also directed by Neill). Both plays suffer the same problem, though I think Heads was a stronger piece overall, for two reasons – character and narrative.
In Maybe Sunshine there are three characters. Daniel Ndlovo (played by Zingi Mtuzula) is the honest, hard-working black proletarian with missionary school values, who describes himself as “a well behaved” black in old South Africa. Mtuzula acts well, though on the night I attended he didn’t quite reach into his emotional centre in a climactic scene in which he recalls the deaths of his children. His family has made the ultimate sacrifice in the struggle; after liberation, his other child was also senselessly killed by a ricocheting bullet. Now he is expectantly awaiting the benefits promised by the new South Africa.
Then there’s George Delport (Pierre Malherbe) retrenched by affirmative action and now in security management. His car has been stolen and he suspects the third and pivotal character Vusi, convincingly played by Mbulelo Grootboom (who Cape Town audiences most likely last saw in The Suitcase) of stealing it.
Vusi is a slick member of the nouveau noir, playing the system for all it’s worth and exhibiting the type of ostentation which is the subject of today’s column by Steven Friedman in Business Day (July 12 Business Day). “Your type has always stolen” is the observation made about him.
Much of the dialogue is the rhetorical sparring between these viewpoints (always with the author’s shadow in the background), but mostly between Vusi and the other characters. In Hunt’s allegory character tends to give way to rhetoric, realism to metaphor (Delport’s Ford turns out to be stolen anyway, symbolising the white’s ill-gotten gains).
Hunt’s play is part of a current trend. Journalist Hans Pienaar’s Three Dozen Roses which won the Jury Award for Best Script in the PANSA Festival of Contemporary Theatre Readings last year, is an example of the tedium this style can produce, if not handled correctly. Mike van Graan’s Green Man Flashing is perhaps the most successful, achieving both narrative interest and a roundness of character, though he has been less successful with the first version I saw of Some Mothers’ Sons and Hostile Takeover. Van Graan’s plays however manage to advance beyond the normal commentary we find in public debate; they state the things people think, but don’t say; and crucially they force the audience to face almost impossible moral choices. Regrettably, Hunt doesn’t get there.
In this genre of political plays, often journalistic in expression, characters tend to have things happen to them in order to produce layered or ironical situations, which the polemicist and political commentator can then exploit. There is no rule that says a play has to have a narrative structure obeying E.M. Forster’s famous law of “and then what happened?”, but it helps move the play along. Nor does a play have to have ‘rounded’ characters with some agency in their story, but I think pairing these down to the levels that Hunt has done is problematic for an audience. I miss individuated psychological motivation and human accountability in all these works.
Bluntly put, Maybe Sunshine is basically three viewpoints in search of characters and an author in search of a story.
Most people find political debate extraordinarily boring and I think it is perfectly well served in the opinion and commentary pages of our daily newspapers, a vibrant non-fiction book press, and various public channels. A play must go much further, and the tools that allow it to be more profound than a letter to the editor is its use of character and story. Dressing opinions up as drama turns theatre and the play into a kind of industrial debate. Open sessions with the audience and discussions after Maybe Sunshine with the playwright or director would be a great idea, and for many will constitute a positive and entertaining experience. I must stress here that Maybe Sunshine is by no means a write-off and a far better play than Three Dozen Roses for instance.
But I prefer the Ellenbogen school, which uses a good story and three-dimensional characters to make us face up to those hard questions we are confronted with when our private lives intersect with the broader political debate. When it is simply characters arguing political points, I am not stirred beyond accepting, rejecting, agreeing or reflecting on what they said. Without a compelling drama, I have no stake in the opinions of the characters. I am not in any way challenged as a participant in my society. Instead, Maybe Sunshine, is an obviously intelligent writer wanting to add his view to the debate.
Whereas Ndlovo and Delport have a vague realism, Vusi is the least convincing as a character. Who is Vusi? Tellingly he does not have a surname. He is essentially a white man’s construction (however left leaning). He’s a voice invented as a foil, a phantasm to express views against which a white voice feels it has to defend itself and find acknowledgment. There are no Vusis out there in the world, ‘character’ is here an intersection of reflected fears and opinions in limbo (some of them rather narrow).
Overall, Maybe Sunshine is well written, and there are many great lines. For instance one passage describes the sacrifices made during the days of apartheid in the form of church tithes as “paying money we didn’t have to someone we could not see for a job he wasn’t doing”. There are several startling images that leap at one, like the reference to a sacrificial goat pulling on its tether. Good use is also made of religious parody, which works well, while many gay and camp references are far less successful and seem unlikely – if not arbitrary – in the mouths of the characters.
The play starts to labour towards the end, finding it hard to find a resolution. It settles for optimism, the three characters all drive off together, in this case hopefully into the sunrise.
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