Behind the soundscape: Charl-Johan Lingenfelder, above, behind the scenes of Moffie, for which he created soundscape. Photos: Daniel Rutland Manners
Currently driving Johannesburg theatre audiences wild, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is an upbeat, showstopper of a musical, designed to dazzle and wow and make you want to dance in your seat.
Gratifyingly, even if you’ve seen umpteen versions of what was the very first Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, this rendition is a head-spinning triumph — much of its success and acclaim due to an explosive reimagining of the score, a feat of skill and daring that — along with sublime choreography and phenomenal performances — has catapulted the production into a new dimension.
Much of that is down to the show’s musical supervisor, Charl-Johan Lingenfelder, whose calling card might accurately read, “Overachiever.”
But a whizz-bang, attention-grabbing high-energy, do-over of a well-known musical is only the tiny tip of Lingenfelder’s creative iceberg.
Within the field of sound and music, he is something of a Renaissance man, breezing easily between projects that are often worlds apart.
His name is found in the credits of numerous movies, TV shows, documentaries, musicals and even straight plays, too. Typically, he’s credited with composing, directing the music or designing the sound, but seldom does the job title adequately encapsulate the level of ingenuity he brings to the job.
He’s equally as at home playing the accordion as he is in the recording studio or at an electronic mixing desk twiddling the knobs that orchestrate the elaborate intermingling of sounds and music for live shows.
For his award-winning soundscape design of The Promise, a stage adaptation of the 2021 Booker Prize-winning novel by South African Damon Galgut, he designed and built several microphone-rigged instruments that produced auditory effects by amplifying and distorting sounds and voices captured live during performances.
Last year, apart from working on a lengthy sell-out season of Mamma Mia, there was the high-energy soundtrack for an intense production of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (which debuted in October) and his more recent job as music supervisor for the musical Dear Evan Hansen, which featured a small live orchestra.
Another highlight last year was creating a soundscape for a new one-man stage play Moffie, which played to critical acclaim in London. This month, the show has come “home”, albeit with a different award-winning actor, David Viviers, at its centre.
Actor David Viviers as Nicholas in the play, below. Photos: Daniel Rutland Manners
Based on an autobiographical novel by André Carl van der Merwe, Moffie is a beautiful and devastating tale of gay sexual awakening in the context of forced conscription into the apartheid-era South African Defence Force, including the trials and tribulations (and abuses) of basic training and a harrowing period spent in the clandestine “Border War”.
The story’s eponymous “moffie” — a slur, the equivalent of “faggot”, that was widely used in South Africa in the Seventies and Eighties and to some extent endures today — is its protagonist, Nicholas van der Swart.
He does whatever he must to survive the progression of dehumanising atrocities, many of them aimed at anyone suspected of being homosexual.
The novel was turned into a searing movie that premiered at the Venice International Film Festival in 2019.
As a play, adapted by Philip Rademeyer, it’s breathtakingly intimate, meant to make you feel the pulse and quiver of its narrator’s heart as he discovers lust and love in an oppressive and brutal environment.
Moffie director Greg Karvellas says he wanted the play to “feel like a nightmare”, in that it’s like a ceaseless onslaught of images and memory fragments. “We jump around a lot because I want the feeling of a kind of fever dream, like we’re in Nicholas’s memory palace.”
One way that the multiplicity of traumas and memories is expressed is in Lingenfelder’s soundscape, which brings a rich three-dimensionality to Nicholas’s world.
While the soundtrack evokes environments and moods and a period in time, it also helps create a sense of unease, of something deep-rooted simmering under the surface.
Not only is it there for atmosphere, and to provide a sense of other characters, it’s part of what produces that lump in your throat — or that feeling of relief when Nicholas gets through the next ordeal and the next.
For Lingenfelder, a gay man from a small town who was himself conscripted in the Eighties, the play resonates deeply. Not only does it intersect with his own history, but also with the film Kanarie, which he co-wrote, based on his army experience.
“Kanarie gave me personal catharsis and opened a floodgate of responses from others,” he says.
“Many viewers felt the film gave them permission to confront memories they had suppressed.”
He says both Moffie and the upcoming Showmax documentary series, Unspoken War (the soundtrack of which he collaborated on), continue that process of catharsis.
“They invite audiences to engage with the traumas of South Africa’s border war. For decades, many veterans withdrew from public life, paralysed by guilt, burdened by shame and a sense of irrelevance.”
Lingenfelder says “healing requires acknowledgment, not silence”.
“Theatre has the power to create that space. It lets us confront the ‘sins of the fathers’, not just as history, but as an urgent call to prevent repetition.
“Whether it’s racism, homophobia, or any injustice, art can remind us of our responsibility to act.”
Lingenfelder says a good soundscape not only “underpins the story in ways that are both subtle and profound”, but contributes to that sense of urgency.
Equally, he strives to create moments “that jolt an audience into paying closer attention — or that reveal a new layer of meaning they weren’t anticipating”.
He also regularly opts to go against the grain, steering clear of first choices: “I comb through the script, noting every literal reference to sound — trucks passing, waves on the shore, helicopters, voices.
“Then, having mapped the ‘literal’ sound world, I often run in the opposite direction, creating abstract interpretations that serve the story in unexpected ways.”
He is always looking to deepen the audience’s experience by taking us beyond the obvious.
He calls it the “underbelly”, that layer of meaning beyond what we’re already witnessing on stage.
“Where it goes so wrong for me as an audience member is when the music is merely repeating what I’m already seeing. It works, but it’s not interesting.”
He says the sound should add complexity, deepen and enhance the work, rather than simply underscoring what’s already there.
“In Moffie, the sound is sometimes detailed and real — cutlery scraping, chairs shifting. At other times, war sequences become entirely abstract, with no literal helicopter, but rather synthesised sounds that evoke the same emotional impact.”
He’s always aiming to disrupt symmetry, something that, in any artistic endeavour, can be seductive, but ultimately, doesn’t hold our attention.
“I prefer to create my own sounds rather than solely using libraries.
“For bush scenes, I might process recordings of insects, then layer in my own creations — electronic textures, instruments, even vocal sounds, manipulated beyond recognition.
“This creates an uncanny effect — the ear recognises something familiar, but the brain can’t categorise it. That dissonance unsettles the audience at a subconscious level.”
With Moffie he also wanted to create an immersive environment that provides the audience with “a visceral sense of what it actually felt like at the time when the story plays out”.
“Audiences today cannot easily imagine the atmosphere of the 1970s. Ours was a society ruled by violence.
“Authority was paternalistic — the man was everything and to speak out was to invite danger. If you opened your mouth, you risked being silenced, sometimes literally with a fist. Violence was the default response to conflict.
“That context is difficult to convey to contemporary audiences, who live in a different environment.
“So, I wanted the soundscape to capture that sense of restriction and threat. The audience needs to feel what it was like to be surrounded by loudness, by people shouting, screaming, threatening — not in an abstract way, but in the everyday reality of that era. Society was dominated by intimidation and force.
“By immersing the audience in that oppressive sound world, I try to give them a glimpse of what it meant to live inside that constant pressure.”
Lingenfelder says more than anything else his job as an artist is to “make you feel”. No matter whether those feelings are raw and tender, or uplifting and light, his mission is to touch audiences in some way.
“Ultimately, I want audiences to feel something — exhilaration, discomfort, recognition — anything but indifference. If they walk out breathless, shaken or moved, then the play will have done its job.”
It’s something he says that can be measured in a way that is literal, visceral, and pure. A kind of faith in physiological response to emotion.
“My religion, if I had to pick a religion, is ‘goosebumps’,” he says.
“You can’t fake goosebumps. They just happen. You can put all your trust and hope into them. If something gives you goosebumps, there’s something there that is pure.”
You needn’t be a believer, though, to know that he’s right. Go see (and hear) Moffie for yourself and let its emotions wash through.
Moffie is running at The Baxter in Cape Town from 3 to 27 September.