It is apparent from Homegroan, his latest show, that Cape Town stand-up comedian Kurt Schoonraad has certainly benefitted from working under the direction of Rob van Vuuren. His caricatures are sharper and better observed; his range is wider, and his physicality more convincing (and funnier).
The material itself is mostly new (since Spiders and Mayonnaise), but the routine is in the usual vein. Schoonraad concentrates on the coloured community and on the audience recognising themselves in his gentle self-satire. (When in doubt, tell a hair joke.) His strongest rapport with the audience however is when he is himself, vulnerable and truthful.
Having developed his grasp of comic situation, the problem now is that many of his sketches seem to dissipate prematurely. One scenario, an alien abduction, ends just as it might become interesting. Schoonraad needs to be more imaginative in pushing the boundaries and building upon a joke. Too much material remains just that – a one-liner.
There are some chuckle-worthy observations of the comic in the commonplace. This is inoffensive, Everyman’s comedy to delight the suburban sentiment.
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Love and the anxiety of separation are concomitant. In a country unfortunately all too aware of the precariousness of life, Louw Venter (a.k.a Corné of the comic duo with Twakkie in The Most Amazing Show) as a young father has fretted about what would happen if his children were left behind. In his one-man play, Out of Time, an everyday family picnic is transformed into a terrifying confrontation with our mortality.
While at some horseplay with his brother, Lukas Nel (Venter) falls with his back on a rock paralysing him. As in Graham Weir’s far darker piece Brief Descriptions, from now on, he can speak his thoughts directly to the audience, but no one else can hear him. Nel, dying, watches his young son. The dramatic monologue that ensues is his paean to him.
The scenario is a neat conceit for the helplessness all parents feel to protect their children against life’s vagaries. It is also a natural opportunity to reflect on his own father – taking the good and breaking with the destructive patterns. Venter draws neat caricatures of Nel’s childhood gang of friends and their daredevil antics.
Venter exploits the thematic possibilities successfully, but together with director Rob van Vuuren, they haven’t quite optimised the full dramatic potential of this riveting set-up. Given the situation, Out of Time is a surprising (and fitting) celebration of life and love, but leans perhaps too cautiously towards the comic with an occasional emotional hiatus rather than a climax.
Besides his many talents, clowning clearly comes naturally, but Venter is a superb actor and I’d love to see him one day in a straight part in a solid play. It is well worth seeing Venter immersing himself in his own serious dramatic work.
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Known for their imaginative one-man tours de force, James Cairns (Rat) and Rob van Vuuren (Electric Juju) have much in common. Both are physical theatre practitioners par excellence, but they are also able to construct layered and complex texts. It is a wonderful extravagance to have their singular talents combined in Brother Number.
The first impression when we meet our two protagonists, the brothers Stan (Van Vuuren) and Harvey (Cairns), is that we’ve entered the familiar world of Beckett: a windowless, timeless room where two men are engaged in what appears to be some absurd, Sisyphean administrative task. We recognise too the green South African identity documents they are processing. By touching an ID to his forehead, Stan seated in a chair on top of a desk that appears to be stuck between floors, can see into the world of its holder, while Harvey creates and assigns each a unique number, apparently garnered from the floor.
How they came to be there and what exactly it is that they are doing is the business of the rest of the play, which follows a Kafkaesque journey through the labyrinthine world of the department of home affairs. Or ‘home of fears’ as we used to call it pre-1994. Sinister forces are at work at every turn. In the final minutes, the convoluted plot is somewhat clumsily unwound, resorting to the worn out classic movie formula where the villain tells all while buying the hero enough time to triumph.
Brother Number grapples with numerous ontological questions. How is our conception of ourselves determined by our genetics? What makes us unique? To what extent is our existence defined by today’s bureaucratic state?
Both performers are superb and rewarding to watch regardless of whether the audience understands the metaphysical comedy at play. The characters are appealing and there is a fair amount of clowning, even some satire, but this is a sophisticated work aimed at an intelligent audience.
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Photo: Daniel Galloway
It’s hard to imagine it happening anywhere other than at The Little Theatre. Where else would we have an opportunity to see a full-scale production of Tom Stoppard’s unapologetically intelligent (too many people would say ‘challenging’) comedy classic, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead?
First performed on the fringe at the Edinburgh Festival (1966), it deservedly made Stoppard as a playwright. Rosencrantz (Alan Committie) and Guildenstern (Rob van Vuuren), two specious minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, are trapped in limbo, left dead but unresolved by Shakespeare. It’s a stratagem for Stoppard to examine fate and tragedy, irreverently from the inside, where Waiting for Godot meets Pirandello.
Christopher Weare’s ingenious stage design includes unreachable ladders, levitating chairs and a ramp that cuts through the auditorium. While the other actors disappear as if magically behind a double-door flat, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are always trapped on stage, even during interval.
Meticulous direction allows for some slapstick comedy without ever compromising on the witty and demanding script. Weare’s deft directorial hand is particularly evident in the choreographing of the strolling players’ fast-paced dumbshows, which provide many of the belly laughs, and a twelve-minute Hamlet that precedes each performance. Weare excels at these, having perfected these techniques in previous productions of Lovborg’s Women Considered.
A supporting cast of senior students perform with confidence as the tragedians. Veteran actor Neville Thomas leads them as The Player, a sort of eldritch Cheshire cat with just the right sinister measure. Van Vuuren is enthralling. Committie is superlative. Years of solo work have honed his comic timing to a fine art. Both actors demonstrate a thorough understanding of Stoppard’s erudite humour (duller wits find it gibberish), his rhetorical rhythms and achieve the kind of effortless repartee essential to the comedy. They have found the perfect director in Weare.
Unlike Guildenstern who never wins a toss, you can’t loose seeing this exceptional production.
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Certain unique, comedic talents, you either get or you don’t. The legendary Goon Show is a case in point. Though seldom appealing to duller souls, they would have both ordinary and exceptionally intelligent people either rolling in the aisles or shaking their heads from boredom. The Most Amazing Show (TMAS) with its two homegrown goons, Corne and Twakkie, is another such instance; though thanks to copious, gratuitous buffoonery, it’s less restricted in its appeal to the dimmer wits. Unlike the Goons, with their remarkably clever use of language and their ability to exploit the medium of radio in truly groundbreaking ways, the appeal of TMAS is not as easily explained. They also use eccentric voices and peculiar mannerisms of speech, which until you have had time to tune in, make much of the dialogue and semantic jests utterly unintelligible. The humour is often puerile, but to some extent, so are belly laughs by nature. It’s a clown act, and as such, audiences should go prepared to participate in the game. Well aware of these two performers’ abilities, their subversive use of satire – targeting Jacob Zuma and Manto Tshabalala-Msimang this time – falls short of expectation, dissolving rapidly into little more than screwball antics. One sketch almost redeems the evening; this is when Corne (Louw Venter), and especially Twakkie (Rob van Vuuren), clamber over audience members in the auditorium, hugging and kissing and expressing their love. This is the direct opposite of the comedy of many of our popular comedians, notably slapstick Leon Schuster, who flourish on the comedy of pain and humiliation. For this, we love them. For the rest, many of us wag our heads bemusedly.
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