THEATRE: Robert Greig
Janice Honeyman’s Jukebox Jol (at the Civic Theatre, Johannesburg) reflects more than it says. It reflects the existence of much musical talent and creative vigour but little structure or sense. Christmas is, of course, the season of licensed blandness, and this one concludes a year noticeable for its theatrical dullness.
The demise of apartheid deprived our theatre artists of a reason for existence: the best talents seem devoted to bureaucratic causes, like scrounging for taxpayers’ money, or musical revivals. In fact, there seems a principle here: when our music scene is vigorous, energy seems to leak out of our theatre. Dunno why. Right now if you want to experience creative energy taking form, and not merely being its own justification, you should probably avoid the theatre and go to dance or concerts.
Jukebox Jol tries to get around the apparent antagonism of forms by using mainly South African music to amplify modern-day fairy tales. Cover versions of songs by Mango Groove et al are embedded into the narrative, usually with Honeyman’s customary exuberance, knock-out wit and simple staging. Because the singing is so good, the songs tend to become setpieces, flying loose of the narrative. That doesn’t really matter: Jukebox Jol is a pleasant distraction and amiable entertainment.
This is particularly true of the first half, where the songs and the fairy tales merge better, mainly because the tales are told with vitality and cleverness. In the second half, the narrative becomes threadbare, revealing the pieties. There’s a version of Little Red Riding Hood set in a dorp that restates every dorp stereotype and the tale about two abandoned children in the wicked, drug-laden world of Hillbrow. Both are laboured, again except for the songs.
Jukebox Jol is a show that is determined to be agreeable. Most musicals are: they are popular reflections of popular moods. Their interest is in the orthodoxies they reflect and consolidate.
The orthodoxies of Jukebox Jol are simple enough: Local is Lekker and Be Positive — currently the catch-all term for, inter alia, optimistic, hopeful, patriotic, myopic, simple- minded, boorish, vacuous, uncritical, enthusiastic and fatuous.
Jukebox Jol proves that local is lekker as far as music goes. But that’s not really saying very much. The local-is- lekker ideology was a useful compensatory tactic 20 years ago when all we saw were recycled has-beens from Broadway and the West End. It may now be equally useful for local musicians who unremarkably believe they are entitled to more airtime. But it seems that a tactic has turned into a smug, provincial evasion of the really tough issues of quality, a strategy for entrenching second-rate reputations and for some kind of collective amnesia.
Certainly South African music, theatre and dance all have their wonders but they’re also deformed mutants which for 20 years survived on a thin gruel of self-righteousness and defensiveness. If sanctions did nothing else, they cut us off from ideas and techniques, making us subscribe to the cop-out that accidents of location were inherently virtuous — and their products superior as art. Jukebox Jol exploits these prejudices.