THEATRE: Bafana Khumalo
A GROUP of highly skilled musicians, dancers and singers invades a small stage, bashing out a mournful tune, the sound filling up the venue until even the most restrained member of the audience acknowledges: “They are good, they are damn good!”
This is the scaled-down version of Mothobi Mutloatse’s Sell Out! The Musical, presented at this year’s National Arts Festival.
Dressed in brightly coloured jackets — not the kind of stuff anyone would be seen dead wearing in public, but beautifully crafted all the same — the band reading sheet music, the show cuts a strange sight in a country where black performers over the last decade seemed to be staying true to some leftwing how-to manual. The chief instruction in this manual said that for a good black cultural presentation, one had to portray on stage the rags-to-riches story; that for a black production to have the right credentials, it had to present a bare stage and bare-chested victims revelling in their own victimhood and declaring some noble sentiment with a ring of futility in their voices.
The storyline of Sell-Out! revolves around a director who, an hour before the opening of a play, is compelled to substitute the main lead who has phoned in — in a state of inebriation — to say that he has been arrested. The plot develops to a stage where the director confesses to his cast that he has been a police informer for more than a decade. “What happens next?” asks the programme. One has to wait for the complete production to find out.
If this was indeed a skeleton presentation, the full production should be worth seeing. Unlike a host of other Fringe productions, Sell-Out! The Musical was not a collection of people with enthusiasm, a lot of promise and enough rough edges to try one’s open-mindedness to no end. This was a slick production with a glamorous compEre spellbindingly leading one through the host of songs and dance routines, as she introduced each act or chaperoned another one off stage.
In some circles this might be seen as a wannabe-white production for, sitting in the audience, one could imagine how the auditions must have been. One imagined a cliched audition where people’s dreams of stardom are shattered by the producer. This phantom producer, sitting in a darkened auditorium, disinterestingly watching a gawky, starstruck teenager go through a gumboot dance routine, could flick the poor child off stage — with the same degree of distaste one reserves for slimy crawling insects with no positive contribution to make in the wider scheme of things — with the shout: “Next please!”
However the play was actually cast, the musicians and dancers are black, and none of them is an affirmative action appointee,
The full production will use the musical talents of the likes of Tu Nokwe on acoustic guitar and vocals, Sophie Mgcina and, adding a touch of the African drum, the insanity of Mabi Thobejana — the only person who can give respectability to the crass, essentially racist sentiments about the African drum talking and waking up the devils in one.
Some of the music, which contains compositions by MacKay Davashe, Allen Silinga and Victor Ndlazilawane, elicited less than a round of polite applause from me, but, I suppose, in a complete production they will have their place.
Hopefully in the complete production the band will play the full version of Ezra Ngcukana’s You Think You Know Me, You Don’t Know Me, a mournful brass section-driven jazz piece which takes one out of the theatre to places where pride is a matter of course.