Some excellent productions _ and only a few empty seats … Humphrey Tyler reports on the highs and lows of the Main festival
A TORTOISE called Lightning; a randy aunt (played by a man); a gaunt, unfortunately too querulous artist in period costume; and a mesmeric grey business suit hanging on a clothes hanger in the spotlight on-stage are some of the features of a remarkable Main programme at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in Grahamstown this year.
Most of the drama productions on the programme have sold out completely. Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt was packed for its first performance and the entire run promptly sold out as soon as word got out that the show was as good as it had been rumoured to be.
There has also been a huge rush for tickets for DJ Grant and Susan Pam-Grant’s Take the Floor and Paul Slabolepszy’s latest play, Victoria Almost Falls, which opens tonight.
There were a few empty seats on the opening night of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia _ a scintillating verbal counterpoint involving umpteen characters _ but the run sold out almost immediately after that.
Arcadia is an intellectual detective story sparkling with wit and allusion _ in fact, a typical Stoppard piece.
The action flits back and forth in time and, philosophically, from an orderly Newtonian concept of a predictable universe and human life to the apparently uncontrolled behaviour of quarks, the Big Bang theory and the mysteries of black holes in the sky that could one day gobble us all up.
Roaming in this time warp is the delightful teenage daughter of a titled British family _ who is as interested (perhaps more) in the enticements of carnal intercourse (does it mean meat?) as she is in her own presumptuous experiments with mathematics. In fact, did she discover the chaos theory of describing the universe an age before it was even given a name?
Byron just has to be in the plot (but the question is, was he actually there or is it just hearsay?) and there are acid academics promoting their own theories and waspishly ripping their rivals.
The play is an effervescent exercise in intellectual examination peppered with repartee and tomfoolery. It has been almost with relief that audiences have responded to the (few) more obvious jokes.
Arcadia is now off to the Nico Malan in Cape Town.
Travels with My Aunt is much more accessible, but without the acid frisson of Stoppard’s relish for intellectual games. A male cast of four, headed by Michael Atkinson, play in turn a mulitude of parts, including a properly prudent retired bank manager, who finally kicks over the traces, and the banker’s quixotic aunt Augusta. There are also a variety of thugs, an Italian girl, a Spanish gentleman, Colonel Hakim and the mysterious, heavily accented Mr Visconti. Being a Graham Greene special, there is also, of course, a vicar and a Quiet American from the CIA.
It is a gentle examination of morality and human naughtiness and is presented by Peter Toerien.
The latest adaptation of Can Themba’s The Suit (by Mothobi Mutloatse) is more of a short story related with relish and interspersed with dramatic interludes than a full-on play. But it works.
The story is set in Sophiatown, just west of Johannesburg, which was demolished by the National Party which bulldozed the blacks, Indians and coloured people who lived there and turned the place into a white Triomf.
A doting, newly-married husband returns unexpectedly one morning to find another man in bed with his wife. The man leaps out of a window, but he leaves his suit behind. The husband devises an exquisitely cruel torture as revenge for his wife’s unfaithfulness.
Themba is a cult hero of the Fifties and of Drum magazine at that time. Sello Maake kaNcube, Stella Khumalo, Job Kubatsi and Alistair Dube present his play with warmth, humour and, in the end, pathos. Their packed audiences have responded often with standing ovations.
Deon Opperman’s Goya, based on the life and times of the great Spanish painter, is less successful. Opperman says in his director’s notes that “very little is known about Goya’s life”. Opperman’s play does not help.
An often tedious monologue, it is delivered with resentful angst by Dick Reineke. God save us if Opperman does, say, Beethoven next. Or Bach.