Four new plays are being showcased at the Civic — in the form of dramatised readings. Matthew Krouse, who participated in one, reports
DISCONTENTED local dramatists, tired of playing second fiddle to international work, can perhaps begin to breathe a small sigh of relief. As the first two dramatised play readings of New Stages — showcased by the Civic theatre’s recently established development portfolio — have shown, there is indeed a curious public out there, one that could reassert its commitment to local theatre.
In choosing four new plays for this type of performance, the Civic is using some of its resources to bolster cultural “empowerment”. Development manager Tale Motsepe announced late last year that four of the many new unproduced scripts in circulation would be chosen by appointed directors for presentation using minimum budgets.
While sex and sexuality are major points of interrogation in all four works chosen, the new directors are eager to establish the fact that we’re standing on new ground. While familiar characters keep popping up, they’re no longer the cardboard cut-out, noble strugglers of before. Now, they are living icons of their desires.
Robert Colman’s Afrodizzia, set in a bankrupt restaurant in decaying Johannesburg, contains farcical humour about workers’ sexual frustrations, and Aiden Love’s forthcoming If I Get You I’ll Klap You Roxanne (February 3 and 4) exploits a shock element to show the delicate balance between violence and lust. Set in a seamy Durban stripper club, If I Get You … proposes to be hard hitting and real. Director Melinda Ferguson intends to “make the sex real, to make the drugs real, and to make the abuse real,” in an endeavour to “cross the fourth wall and get the audience involved.” The play, as she describes it, also attempts to show “people untouched by the new South Africa. They live in a hovel and so it means nothing to them.”
Others have used popular convention borrowed from television sitcoms. Afrodizzia, incorporating the rare characterisation of a quick-thinking black gay chef pitted against his Swiss boss, shows the potential humour and contradiction still implicit in our post- apartheid state.
We’re seeing familiar things through new eyes, and meeting new practitioners, who, for various reasons, have kept their talents under cover. This has been the case with two of those involved in the first reading of Positive People. Both director Philiswa Biko and playwright Gordon Hersman are as yet unknown. Yet both are relatively accomplished. Hersman’s third play, directed by Biko, who has worked elsewhere in Africa, has marriage and monogamy as its central theme.
Ultimately, it required more exploration than such a reading could allow, and more experience than its young cast could muster, but the play is surprising in its simple (but not simplistic) expose of the affairs of comfortable suburbanites — and how they discover the realities of Aids. Intrigue keeps the play light enough to be educative without being didactic. As Biko said, in the discussion following his play, he found it to be “a serious issue made so easy to understand”.
Showing this weekend (January 27 and 28) is a “collection of impressions and stories lifted from the works of three Afrikaans writers” titled Familie and directed by Francois Venter. It is compiled from the works of Koos Prinsloo, Ryk Hattingh and Dirk Winterbach. Even though the chosen stories and poems have been published, it stands as the director’s response to issues affecting the family, and promises to be no less personal than the pieces which came before.
As a participant in this process (I had a small part in Afrodizzia), it was interesting to see what could be achieved in four short days of rehearsal. While the stress to invent a performance in such a short space of time is a little harrowing, the end results should be encouraging to any ambitious newcomers.The collaborative element is also cause for optimism. Some of these participating actors and directors have spent recent months developing work along similar lines at the Market Laboratory. Afrodizzia began there as a workshop. Perhaps we are about to enter a new phase of co- operation in this arena, one in which the major venues could combine resources. Freed from their historically defined roles of opposition, the potential for new work becomes even more open-ended.