Much is said about South Africa’s singing talent and musical and dramatic potential. The country has a long and proud history of choral music — of people from schools, churches and communities gathering together in song to uplift themselves. This has been the breeding ground for some of the country’s most talented individuals who are now ready to share their skills locally and on the global stage.
The depth of this talent became clear when I visited a small church hall in the windy Cape Town suburb of Athlone, where 30 young South Africans — members of the newly formed Portobello Productions — have been training and preparing rigorously to take part in two simultaneous productions at the Baxter Theatre Centre.
The company showed off its enormous potential at a recent rehearsal. A glorious operatic chorus burst forth, accompanied by marimbas, to which dancers performed a boisterous kwaito-influenced sequence.
British theatrical director Mark Dornford-May, with some capable collaborators, recruited the cast of talented performers aged between 17 and 30. Each member of the cast was trained to sing, dance, act and play the marimba — the only musical instrument used. Every member came in with an established ability in one of these fields and learned additional skills from other members. The result is a company that is multi-talented rather then specialised.
Dornford-May is working with a team of co-writers, including his wife, opera singer/actress Pauline Malefane — the couple most recently collaborated on the award-winning film U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, based on Bizet’s opera Carmen, but sung in isiXhosa and set in the Cape Flats. Dornford-May directed the film, with Malefane starring and translating from the original French.
Now the team has approached its new productions in a similar way — by adapting Mozart’s The Magic Flute and the Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol, into contemporary South African settings and vernacular.
Soloists were chosen to take on major roles after a workshopping process that allowed individual singers to show their worth, tackling the challenges of Mozart’s popular opera and the well-loved Dickens fable. Both require focused acting and accomplished singing, especially the opera.
I was particularly impressed with the use of marimbas as musical backing, which instantly Africanised Mozart’s music. Eight chromatic marimbas sit on stage ready to be played by the members of the company, rather than by a separate off-stage orchestra.
The marimbas lack the substance and variety of woodwinds, but the company showed how these limitations can be overcome. What might have been lost in sustainment was more than made up for by rhythmic drive and texture.
Much of this success is due to the efforts of conductor/musical director Mandisi Dyantyis, a young jazz trumpeter and recent University of Cape Town graduate.
The contemporary reading of The Magic Flute/Impempe Yomlingo downplays the fantasy elements of the story in its attempt to connect with a modern audience.
The Christmas Carol/Ikrismas Kherol offers a surprisingly dark and ‘un-Disneyfied” version of Dickens tale, set on Jo’burg’s mines with Malefane playing a cynical female Scrooge. In the opening sequence the cast sings and uses chains and steel drums to create the overwhelming cacophony of a coalface. Without costumes and only a dusty floor as a set, the effect is riveting.
The Magic Flute/Impempe Yomlingo and A Christmas Carol/Ikrismas Kherol will run concurrently throughout October into early November at the Baxter Theatre Centre. The productions then move to London’s Young Vic Theatre from November 19 .