Penalty Shootout is the third and latest edition of Mike van Graan’s popular, award-winning Bafana Republic one-person, political, comedy revue brand. This time it is young Lungi Pinda who performs under the direction of Mandla Mbothwe.
Projections of Zapiro’s cartoons set the scene for each skit, opening with an estate agent kugel trying to sell Greenpoint stadium after the FIFA World Cup. Others include Madonna hosting celebrity adoptions; a man faking disability giving his take on the political situation; an evangelical preacher soliciting funds from us in order to pay for the soccer event which will bring the new dawn; an over-long spy scandal skit that (somewhat tediously) strings together James Bond film titles; a song “blame apartheid”; a rich, racist white woman with a racist dog struggling to come to grips with transformation at her children’s school; and the top 10 hits as reflecting various public figures. The most satirical sketch targets the African renaissance with a lecture in Dictator 101, and the cleverest is a spoof on South African politics by parodying the most famous lines penned by Shakespeare.
As a performer Pinda is limited to variations on two voices, and his female characters come across more as television stereotypes of over the top gay queens than women. The first Bafana Republic with Lindiwe Matshikiza remains the best performed. The current show is less reactionary and shrill and therefore somewhat funnier than the second instalment.
The problem I have with the Bafana series is that the structure of each skit has become lax. The satirical voice is too muted, because what we get is not quite satire, but almost a string of political jokes imposed on several fuzzily defined South African voices. A better performance would help somewhat.
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Photo: Andrew Borwn
During his six-week residency last year at the University of Cape Town, Mike van Graan wrote Mirror Mirror as a performance piece for students. They have now taken it from festivals through to the professional stage.
A prolific and reliable playwright, Van Graan continues to experiment with genre, this time turning his hand to Brechtian alienating effects and transparent theatre making with an ensemble of modern troubadours.
South African politics are allegorized around a Disney-style faux castle. Apartheid days are recast as feudal times; the white queen and her foppish royals rape and plunder the country; the sansculottes are led by the palindromic Okib (soon tortured to death); and when the peasants’ revolt succeeds the peasant leader starts the cycle all over again in a battle for power with his bribe-taking Number 2. Mirror is an entertaining, camp romp through puns on politics.
A comparison with a work employing the same aesthetic, The Fantastical History of a Useless Man, but made in 1976 to protest apartheid and colonial history, reveals the limitations of this technique in a democratic era. We no longer live in a county where the State has total control of truth and people believe a simplistic received mythology, a Bible-story past. The project then was to debunk with bunk, and the transgression was akin to burning the flag. The political stance to take was far clearer and there was a call to action. Neither is available to Mirror. The personal conscience is not here put to the screw.
Life is far more amorphous today. Mirror absorbs that shapelessness and what we have is a ramble rather than a trajectory. Unlike Useless Man, in Mirror we have no point of edifying focus (the Useless Man). Van Graan could have made the pauper Patience the epicentre, one of the “useless many” as it were, the apposite vehicle for such a parable.
What Van Graan has done is prepared students to think about their position politically as artists, something they probably had never done, though that is of limited interest to audiences. Cultural activism remains a legitimate weapon to use against the state. But an allegorized polemical column does not serve Van Graan as well as does his satirical comedies and his serious plays.
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Photo: Charley Pollard
As part of his writing residency at the University of Cape Town drama department, Mike van Graan gave a public lecture in which he wondered why we have moved from protest theatre to the theatre of conformity. Are we too confused by our past loyalties and the complexity of our current problems to feel justifiably outraged? In the same lecture, Van Graan singled out Pieter-Dirk Uys as one of the few who had remained true activists, who “aimed his barbs at the current wielders of power as much as he did to the previous government”.
What a welcome boon it is then to have Van Graan following suit and entering the satirical scene. Always the activist, Van Graan finds much to be dissatisfied with and therefore to satirise in the new South Africa. His latest production, Bafana Republic, is inspired by the impending 2010 FIFA World Cup, and its subtext is the question: are we in danger of becoming a banana republic?
Van Graan has composed a dozen sketches. Director Lara Bye has drawn impressive versatility from actress Lindiwe Matshikiza, whose delivery is closer in style to that of John Leguizamo (Mambo Mouth) than Uys. There are fewer visual jokes, but each character has a distinctive and recognisable voice – the coach Raymond Hack, Chardonnay the footballer’s abused wife, and Jorge, Carlos Perreira’s BEE (Brazilian Economic Empowerment) partner who collects the coach’s salary in two large suitcases. The text is dense with puns and the sprightly word play we expect from Van Graan, which makes it worth seeing a second time.
It opens with a proudly South African welcome for the fans arriving in 2010 when Zuma is President and nothing works. Soon we meet Martine van Schalkwyk conducting township tours and the Bhamjee entrepreneurs selling 2010 magic wands that eliminate poverty and crime (no refund). Some portraits are more biting, Pahad (read Essop) suppressing dissent and Kabouter who has a remarkable resemblance to Wouter Basson.
Van Graan, as a columnist, knows how to produce pithy vignettes, the most successful are those that have a dramatic vehicle to deliver them – a roller coaster, Bafana idols, match commentary and a climactic farewell song, a re-lyricised version of De La Rey that goes:
Van der Spuy, Van der Spuy
Sal jy ons hoere kom vry want ons lei Van der Spuy
Ons is kaal kom betaal
Dan mag ons eet nog een maal
Asseblief Van der Spuy
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As one of the few practicing contemporary South African playwrights able to construct morally complex and dramatically layered scripts dealing with highly controversial socio-political topics, Mike van Graan’s latest Some Mothers’ Sons is highly recommended.
In the telescoped space of two prison visits, two men – Vusi and Braam – confront their differences: first in apartheid South Africa, where Vusi is a detainee undergoing torture and Braam a leftward leaning human rights lawyer-activist; then under the new democratic dispensation where multiple murders end in a reversal of their situation.
At a time when the numbness towards human life leads criminals to kill as easily as their victims find it to howl for the death penalty, Van Graan’s informed approach makes this two-hander essential viewing.
As a dramatist, he has a knack for creating predicaments that allow him to wring out every ambivalence, shade, contradiction and aporia in his focus. The engine of his theatre is clearly issue driven and he manipulates character and fate to explore these.
Although strong on theme, when compared to his other works, it lacks the dramatic bite of Green Man Flashing or the riskiness of Hostile Takeover. The problem is its all too perfect symmetry – two equal halves, two equally matched characters. This encourages a soft spot in Van Graan’s theatre as dialectic. At times, it feels like a debate with dramatic trimmings – even though it is complex, layered and the situations themselves are riveting. Stronger performances would have helped overcome this. Dumisani-Sizwe Mbebe all but eclipses Gideon van Eeden.
Interestingly, patrons are divided – Some Mothers’ Sons is seen as a closet pro-death penalty piece or as unambiguously probing from the opposite premise. As a play, it seems to allow us to draw our own conclusions, rather than empowering us with dramatic epiphanies.
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