With crayfish on his shirt, swaggering around in his leather pants and bragging about his hang-over, Sean Taylor declines either tea or coffee, saying that he’d have to drink whisky if he drank anything. It’s not that he seems a lecherous drunkard; on the contrary, he seems only to be playing the part of the enigmatic worldly-wise actor, filling the slot of the interviewee with a larger-than-life rendition of himself.
Taylor has returned from Australia, where he now lives, to play legendary Afrikaans actor André Huguenet (1906-1961) in Athol Fugard’s newest autobiographical play, Exits and Entrances. Taylor is discovering a different South Africa after six years abroad.
The new generation who doesn’t know anything about apartheid astonishes him. Part of him thinks that’s fantastic, but another part feels it’s important to know the history of your country.
The lack of interest in the history of local theatre disgusts him. ‘It is important as an actor — black, white, whatever colour — as a performer, as a theatre practitioner, you should know who these people are — André Hugenuet, Siegfried Mynhardt, Patrick Mynhardt, Gibson Kente, Nomhle Nkonyeni, Winston Ntshona,” he says.
It is therefore fitting that he returns to participate in Fugard’s tribute to his mentor, Huguenet, a distinguished 1930s Afrikaans actor and producer. ‘It’s not just about an old Afrikaans homosexual actor; there were so many subtle things about the politics of this country, about it becoming a republic,” says Taylor.
The play shows two meetings between Fugard and Huguenet. The first is in 1956, in which Fugard is a young, struggling playwright who is given a minor part in Huguenet’s production of Oedipus Rex, and doubles as Huguenet’s dogsbody. Huguenet is at the height of his career.
In the second meeting, in 1961, Huguenet is a broken man — bankrupted, ruined and humbled — disillusioned by the failure of his vision of an Afrikaans theatre liberating his nation. Fugard has just realised his own vision.
‘The genius of the play for me is that Oedipus, and all the play extracts that Athol has used, are about André Huguenet. When he says ‘I am polluted, I am the only man who is polluted’, as Oedipus, he’s talking about himself. When he says, as the cardinal [in The Prisoner] ‘I am the son of my mother, my whole life a fantasy to hide me’, he’s talking about himself. And when in Hamlet he says, ‘The pangs of despised love’, he is talking about himself,” says Taylor.
‘One of the difficulties in the play is that it’s an actor, not necessarily me, but an actor playing André Huguenet, playing Oedipus, and then doing Hassan [James Elroy Flecker’s play], and doing the cardinal. That is one of the fantastic challenges about the piece as an actor,” says Taylor. Having received compliments from old actresses who used to work with Huguenet — ‘You are André” — Taylor seems to have found the balance. ‘Maybe I’m channelling him,” he laughs.
There are some parallels between Taylor and Huguenet. Taylor knows what Huguenet is talking about when he says his home is on the stage. He also concedes that he is similarly arrogant. ‘One has to be in this business, in a way, you have to believe in your own craft, in what you do, to do it well,” he justifies. But he does not struggle with a beaten vision as Huguenet did. ‘Primarily, I am a working actor, a jobbing actor. That’s all I ever wanted to be,” he says.
Taylor dislikes constantly being recognised for his role in the tele-vision drama Barney Barnato — he did it in 1988, he says with disdain. Then he softens: ‘What is nice about it is that most people who know me and like my work know me from theatre.” One friend told him that it was his blessing that he was far too ugly to ever make it on screen. South African audiences last saw him in the film Gums and Noses. His stage credentials are lengthy.
According to Taylor, the roles of Huguenet and as King Lear (in 1998) have been his two favourite, life-affirming roles. ‘The arc in this play is very similar, from the state of supreme arrogance to a state of grace,” he explains, ‘and because I’m middle-aged, these things become more relevant.” His fantasy is to die while performing King Lear again, in the storm scene, mid-sentence.
A number of people have asked him about coming back to South Africa. The actor Oscar Petersen, of the Joe Barber series, said he should come back to teach the next generation. But he says he’s not a teacher. He concedes that one can guide by example but he can’t come back permanently. He’d have to come back to something fixed, for maybe two years, but if he has to hustle for work, he may as well do it in Melbourne. His life is there — with his wife, ex-wife and children.
Exits and Entrances shows at the State Theatre in Pretoria until August 27. It opens at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg on August 30. Book at Computicket.