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.
