THEATRE: Justin Pearce
ART imitates life, life imitates art, and theatre imitates cinema ’cause movies are a whole lot more successful than plays …
No, no, foul, unfair! It’s tempting to speculate that Ian Fraser’s venture into the world of vampirism, Story of an African Vampire, at the Pieter Roos Theatre at the Civic, is an attempt to cash in on the ghoul and bloodsucker movies that have splattered their way across the big screen lately — but the relationship is less parasitic than that. If Hollywood has picked on vampirism as a metaphor for all that is bad in contemporary America — predatory crime, bloodsucking capitalism, and Aids — Fraser re-interprets the vampire as an equally telling way of looking at urban South Africa.
And while the majority of ghoul films are set in a mythical past — providing a distance and therefore a sense of relative security — Fraser sets his squarely in the here and now. Walk out of the Civic Theatre, join the queue of BMWs (as driven by Fraser’s northern suburbs kugels), and there before you in the moonlight are the towers of Hillbrow which provide the perfect hang-out for Fraser’s east European immigrant vampire, Krause.
Fraser frames his tale with a quasi-Shakespearean prologue in which a raconteur from some future age introduces a story from a dark past — a past which is immediately recognisable to us as the present.
Moreover, Krause is the good guy of the piece. A nightly pint or two of plasma seems a forgivable failing in the world of unscrupulous pimps and callous fatcats into which he falls, an innocent at large.
And if cinema’s current fascination with vampirism is fed by our era’s preoccupation with Aids, Fraser takes the idea of vampirism-as-epidemic a step further: once the rats become vampires, the plague spreads faster than the Black Death and it’s naturally the poorest who die first. Hence a gory feast of contradictions: the philanthropic vampire is the one who starts the plague, but with an Old-Testament kind of righteousness Story of an African Vampire implies that there wasn’t very much in the dystopian city that was worth sparing.
There’s something startlingly poetic about the way Fraser chooses his words and creates his major and minor characters in this short (45 minute) but lingering nightmare.
Anyone who remembers Fraser as the twisted bundle of alienation that he was three or four years ago will be surprised (pleasantly or unpleasantly, depending on your own preferences) to find something which it’s hard not to identify as a social conscience. But though his quickfire images are strong enough to burn their way in, Fraser never dwells on protest-theatre pathos.
And vampires as good guys? You might as well search for a moral in Quentin Tarantino.