In response to the shockwaves rippling through society after the 1976 Soweto Uprising, a collective of artists and intellectuals, among them William Kentridge, Ari Sitas, Steven Sack, Patrick Fitzgerald and Pippa Stein, known as the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, created The Fantastical History of a Useless Man.
Now the work has been restaged by BA students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) under the direction of Myer Taub. It’s a theatrical séance that raises the spectre of our recent past and many intriguing questions. Has the revolutionary situation in South Africa been defused or will the country still burn? Is a piece of protest art created in reaction to a particular historical time and event, of relevance or only curiosity today?
Malcolm Purkey, who directed The Fantastical History when it was first performed at the Nunnery Theatre (WITS) was visibly delighted on opening night by Taub’s version, or as he says, “bemused at revisiting my own history”.
Taub has chosen the gallery at the Centre for African Studies, as opposed to a purpose built performance space. He wanted “the live exhibition of a classical (historical) South African play text in a gallery”, set “amongst the art and artifacts of our frightening and fantastical history”. The audience, seated in three-quarter round, are surrounded by a special exhibition curated by Andrew Lamprecht including works by Tretchikoff , Tommy Motswai, Conrad Botes and Pieter Hugo. Before the show a medley of yesteryear South African music plays – “It’s a strange, strange world we live in Master Jack”, and Mango Groove, Hellfire – “There’s a roadblock late at night, And a military man…” A video projection shows film clips of red coated British officers in pith helmets. On a small monitor runs footage documenting the rehearsal period.
The cast are dressed in the khaki uniforms of the Voortrekker youth. They start singing, accompanied by guitar; it sounds like a campfire song with corrupted lyrics: “I think it’s very nice in principle / To be so liberal / But go and give the vote to all? /Ag no! Not to a cannibal!”
The first half is a burlesque pantomime revue of South African history painted in broad sacrilegious brushstrokes starting with the arrival of Van Riebeek – “Calvinism plus 5 percent”; life in the Cape – white ladies drinking tea as they step over the dead bodies of slaves; the Great Trek – an ironic moment as a contemporary wire and beadwork ossewa is wheeled across the stage.
31 years later, the cast are no longer all white. Mandilakhe Yengo, plays Lord Carnarvon, booming, “Oh not another Kaffir War! Is it five or six?” Fatimah Damon (in her mid-thirties she’s the oldest in the cast) caricatures Cecil Rhodes as an effeminate sadomasochist – “farmers will not be allowed to sjambok the native, alas. Oh, for the birch rod of Bishop Stortford!” A spoof about the “external marketing section of the missionary society” preaching “the subjugation of Ham or any other subjugation of your choice”, while collecting a commission on every Good Book they manage to “palm off on the native”, must have been an affront in its time, though there hasn’t been much repenting since. Maps projected on the backdrop graphically show the ever-shrinking parcels of land for the black population, still a burning question.
Viewed today, this radically simplified debunking of the then received mythology about our past is pleasantly droll, but hardly profane. In its day, it must have been like burning the flag. Laughter has changed from shock reflex to risible appreciation.
Brechtian methods of foregrounding technique. of conscientising the audience were at the heart of the Junction Avenue initiative. Purkey says the bedrock was social research. In the workshop process the social world collides with that of personal consciousness, this is the point of social responsibility. The original Useless Man watched everything, an automaton, dehumanised; resisting any tendency to empathic identification by the audience.
But how do you remake a workshop production, inherently a synergy of particular individuals, a work that was only later committed to text, a text that now needs interpretation? It’s a dilemma facing many South African revivals, including works like Sophiatown.
Taub answers that we should “accept a product of a productive misreading”.
His job has been to “channel the voice of the collective”. With his generous, toothy smile, he says he tried not to impose directorial preconceptions. The collective chose themselves from the call backs, voting on who would be in the final cast, a bit like survivor island. They also cast the roles, only after weeks of reading. Taub seems mildly disappointed that this contemporary collective chose conventionally – blond white parents, one male one female, for the Useless Man. But this collective also gave birth to other voices within the play, a garden boy and a previously invisible black family.
The cast of BA students are not necessarily performers, but have enrolled in a drama course. This gives the work interesting textures. A handful of moments of “school play acting” serve his Brechtian method.
Rehearsing for the first time in the actual space where the performance will take place, Taub invites his boisterous young cast of 15 students and three crew members to roam the building. They talk about how their bodies respond to the space. Taub is attempting to honour the work not update it, to revive rather than revise.
What do they make of this play by white students whose crisis of uselessness against the apartheid state and system created the original? Gideon Lombard (21-years-old) plays the Useless Man. Born in Namibia he says his point of entry in to the part was through his own sense of displacement, of living on the ‘margins of history’. Lutho Somdyala, from the small Eastern Cape town of Cofimvaba and 19-years-old, says it has forced him to look at the struggle from another perspective, that of the white liberal, to discover there were paradoxical negative effects of apartheid on white beneficiaries. Luella Holland, whose major is religion, says she understands this frustration of uselessness – “I see poverty on the streets daily, but what do you do?” Fatimah Damon believes we have moved from a racially defined struggle to a class struggle, but ultimately it is the same struggle.
To quote the play: “They refuse to understand the relationship between their wealth and another’s deprivation. These men are white men. White is not a colour. White is an attitude.”
There seems to be a consensus among these students that the Useless Man has become the Useless Many.
The second act is more personal. Some of it is patently dated – a long plea for the legitimacy of South African art and a spurning of Eurocentric culture as a subterfuge against facing reality – “all you visitors to Petticoat Lane, why don’t you look at Diagonal Street?”
Starkly reflected is that angst-ridden time, when the young whites of the Junction, with their entire lives before them faced an impregnable question mark, crushed between increasing oppression and what seemed to be inevitable conflagration. Purkey recalls telling their audience the “third act of the play will be in the streets!”
The core issue then was whether the play should end as a call to revolution. “What are you prepare to do?” asks the compère. The text ends “I am a coward and a useless man – the most I can do is be the least obstruction”.
Purkey says there was a heated debate. Unable in good conscience to take up arms most white liberals believed they should make space for the revolution, accept it was not their moment in history and move aside. However, he vehemently maintains that cultural activism was as legitimate a weapon as any, to use against the state. Others in the collective, like Patrick Fitzgerald, did go into exile with the intent of taking to arms.
Purkey says he is no longer interested in making polemical works or “taking a political position within a text”.
Mark Fleishman, head of the UCT Drama Department and facilitator for an open public conversation with Purkey and Taub, agrees – the contrasts in our society are as stark as ever, yet he sees no clear stance to take. Before, it was anti-apartheid, one man one vote. Today? Purkey adds how disappointed he is at COSATU throwing their lot behind “a man like Zuma”.
It’s the “economic system we have that is useless”, he says, “yet what is the alternative”?
