As the dust of an almost bewildering media storm finally begins to settle around Breyten Breytenbach’s Boklied, Charl Blignaut asks what the reaction to the play means
One should have smelled it from a mile off, really, the faint whiff of scandal rising from the Boklied posters mingling with the cloying fragrance of potpourri and the tangy aroma of shishkebabs braaing at the annual boere bazaar in Oudtshoorn.
It was in the air long before the young black actor on stage decided to ditch his trenchcoat and strap-on dildo and settle into his role as Ritsos in Breyten Breytenbach’s epic Boklied (Goat Song) buck naked. Before, even, he and Isis set about exploring Tereus’s bared bum, somewhat gleefully sticking a feather up it while drag king Antoinette Kellerman as Farenj ravaged petite little Grethe Fox’s Madonna in the background.
I mean, it was pretty damn obvious that there would be the walk-outs from among the select audience at the Klein Karoo Kunstefees premiere of Breytenbach’s first-ever stage play. You’d expect nothing less from two notorious Afrikaner subversives – the formerly exiled poet Breytenbach and the radical Cape Town director Marthinus Basson. But even so, no one involved really expected quite such a virulent outbreak of genital panic as was to hit the festival, sending shock waves all the way to Cape Town and Johannesburg. Within two days that feather had hit the headlines and Boklied shifted gear from half-full houses to a jam-packed sell-out. Local myth even saw the scalped ticket price rocket into the R500 region.
“What I found most disturbing,” says actor Gustav Geldenhuys, recipient of the feather, “was the fact that the press focused only on those three scenes, ignoring the hundreds of other themes and ideas running through the play. You know, I was speaking to a Dutch theatre producer after the show and he was completely thrown. `Is it just this town,’ he asked, `or is this the level of theatre debate in South Africa?'”
It’s a good question, particularly considering the fact the producer in question is in the process of setting up a 1999 European tour for Boklied. You can rest assured audiences in Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and Berlin will regard the play as a relatively normal experimental theatre experience.
“The problem,” says Basson, “is that when you confront a South African audience with something that is oblique, yet ordinary elsewhere, they freak out. I mean, aside from the sex thing, because after those first two days you could see the debate shift from sex to other issues in the play, but even the critics. Only one or two of them actually tried to engage with the play and get to grips with what was happening on stage. Are we so insular and so self-satisfied; have we aimed so low that when a challenge faces us we don’t know what to do with it?”
Sure enough, after the feather, the next media clich to be pegged on the play was: “Brilliant, even though we didn’t understand a word of it.”
“You’re not supposed to understand,” growled Breytenbach, “just sit back and listen to the rhythms, absorb the images.”
Of course, Breytenbach hasn’t attempted to make things any easier for an audience – not that he necessarily should have, but perhaps a little contextual generosity on his part could have helped draw more people into the experience.
A three-hour long, visually rich play that throws out a vast network of references covering everything from Greek and Egyptian mythology to Victorian pornography, Afrikaner folklore to contemporary politics, post-structuralist reception theory to the mad carnival of late 1990s millennial fever, Boklied lends itself to interpretation. There are no easy answers.
On the one hand its prison setting, tinged with the haunting presence of memory, suggests that the play’s protagonist/antagonist, Meester, is Breytenbach himself, sitting in prison, trying to control a marauding cast of characters in his head as they ritually enact his quest for freedom and his hankering after death.
Then again, the stage could just as well be a disused theatre, a bordello or a fleeting glimpse of the banquet hall of the gods, looking down on a burning city. What Breytenbach really goes for here is the whole poet thing.’n Wrede nasie verloor sy digters (a cruel nation loses its poets).
But if Boklied is indeed an angry call to respect and understand the place of the poet in society, then perhaps its author could have taught us so in a way that is slightly more understandable in the first place.
No one is asking him to compromise, but had he let the audience know – as he has done in the published text of Boklied – that the play involves a group of ageing actors who come together regularly and engage – literally to the death – in ritual dramatic enactments, then perhaps his audience would have had some sort of framework to anchor their viewing.
One gets the sense, though, that Breytenbach prefers it this way. If we don’t understand it, we sure as hell can’t criticise it. He’s cleverer than us and that’s that. Hell, Boklied is a classic and don’t you dare disagree.
Still, if the reaction to the play is indeed some sort of cultural barometer, then the fact that this drama has played itself out in the domain of Afrikaner culture is particularly interesting.
No matter how badly those intellectuals who fled the first performances would like to deny it, Boklied is a major new gem in the Afrikaner’s cultural crown. Hell, it’s set to tour Europe and – ironically – it has brought a sorely needed air of respectability to the much-maligned Klein Karoo Kunstefees.
Previously notorious for its racist undertones – beer cans flying at Miriam Makeba’s 1997 appearance – the Oudtshoorn festival is now also famous for its permissiveness. Boklied was, after all, the official opening event of the festival.
Love him or hate him, Breytenbach has furthered the cause of Afrikaans literature, that even his critics can’t deny.
What many people have missed, however, is that much of the credit for Boklied should actually be given to Basson and his extraordinary cast.
They took a dangerous and difficult text – one that was not even originally intended as a stage play and that makes a lot more sense when read as prose – and have presented it with such keen instinct and overwhelming beauty that, even if you can’t understand a word of Afrikaans, you can still recognise the genius twisting through the work.
It’s not Breytenbach’s arrival on the local theatre scene that brings me hope; it’s the acceptance of Basson as a major South African director, able to interpret difficult, indigenous works.
It was in the mid-Eighties that he last presented a play like Boklied. It seemed, as the South African stage began to bury itself in didactic social treatises, as if those heady days of difficult, fertile images were gone for good. But Boklied has offered a possible way forward. It may even one day be regarded as the Sarafina of a whole new tradition of struggle theatre in South Africa. One that seeks to free our minds. The rest will follow.