THEATRE: David le Page
THE spirit of Roy Campbell currently haunts the Alexander Theatre, in writer and director Anthony Akerman’s play Dark Outsider. But it is not the robust and extravagant ghost we might expect.
In the second act Uys Krige, played charmingly by Alex Ferns, hails in a splendid bon mot the experience of being with Campbell as “a drunkenness of the intellect without the babelas”. One would have hoped our experience of Dark Outsider would be similar. But while it offers a fair biographic portrait of the man, skimming through some of the known seminal incidents in his life, it ventures little in the way of imaginative exploration. For a play that hopes to capture the soul of a poet who created and lived through his own wildly exaggerated personal mythology, this would surely have been appropriate.
Dark Outsider opens with the crashing of waves on the hitherto untroubled shores of a parochial South African literary establishment. Sezela was the Natal beachfront cottage where Campbell, played by Jamie Bartlett, lived with his wife Mary for two years in the mid-Twenties. This was to be the only time in his adult creative life spent in South Africa, the period during which he co-edited Voorslag, the controversial and abortive literary magazine, with William Plomer and Laurens van der Post. Akerman then whirls us to the cottage on the estate of Knole Palace in which Bloomsbury epicenes Harold Nicolson and his wife Vita Sackville-West allowed the always impoverished Campbells to
It was there that Mary Campbell (Camilla Waldman) had the affair with Vita, sketched in shades of venomous detachment by Jennifer Steyn, that permanently eroded Campbell’s self- confidence and crystallised his contempt for the mores of most English intellectuals of the time. Akerman then takes us to Provence where Krige lived with the Campbells, and to Spain, where they converted to Catholicism.
Throughout, Sarah Robert’s hard-working set frames the action with an ocean motif. This could be a comment on Campbell’s drinking; more likely it refers back to his time at Sezela, a constant reminder of his origins.
Though Akerman has rightly melded certain incidents and times, giving, for instance, CS Lewis’ sensitive words “fancy being cuckolded by a woman” to Vita, the play bounces through completely different times in Campbell’s life, which at times distorts our perceptions of him.
Lurching into the Spanish episode, we feel his conversion to Catholicism to be something he did to hold on to Mary, and Campbell seems plaintive and ridiculous as he protests that “that man hung himself on the cross for my sake”; in fact his faith was real, deeply considered and passionate. Equally awkward, almost dismissive, is Mary’s final farewell to Campbell: she simply looks at him, crosses herself and turns away.
But some of these episodes do work. When Van der Post, whom David Clatworthy captures extraordinarily well, reassures Campbell as Mary rushes off to Vita’s increasing uninterest, an awkward embrace between the two men that hints discreetly at Campbell’s bisexuality is deeply moving, as is actor Thomas Hall’s description of Plomer’s life as a lonely homosexual. The passing of an account of Mary’s advances on Plomer, through Van der Post and Krige to Campbell, with the four actors lined up on the stage, is adeptly written and directed, and very funny.
But in all these events, Akerman relies enormously on reported quotes, descriptions written by Campbell’s peers, and even the words of his biographer, Peter Alexander. We get the facts of Campbell’s life, but never really get to feel it.
And this is not because of any failing on the part of Bartlett; on the contrary he captures Campbell’s thick accent, and his frailty barely obscured by machismo, rather well, only occasionally blustering a little too much. His delivery of Campbell’s poetry needs some work, but his Zulu dance is a treat, as is his vividly physical description of wrestling with a buck.
In playing Mary Campbell, Waldman has the play’s most difficult role. Akerman has not given enough thought to who Mary was, and Waldman suffers. While she has Mary’s strength, and is touchingly naive in her relations with Vita, she isn’t able to command much interest. Without much to go on in the script, Waldman has fallen back to playing her in the tone of an almost arrogant English sophisticate, but Mary Campbell was certainly more interesting.
Akerman has made some dubious choices directing her: if complete nudity is really appropriate for after-dinner chatter at Sezela, surely something more than a single kiss is called for in her love-making with Vita Sackville-West.
Akerman’s two strongest characters are Krige and Van der Post. Where Hall’s William Plomer is rather too coy, Ferns’ Krige is rich in detail, eccentric, full of the awkward humility of a youth deeply impressed, though not overawed, by Campbell. Clatworthy’s Van der Post is meek in manner, earnest and uncertain, quietly strong. As colourful, familiar characters whose development cannot have been too strenuous, they stand in stark contrast to Mary. More than anything else, Akerman’s failure to create a convincing persona for Mary Campbell is representative of his play’s
Dark Outsider is at the Alexander Theatre until June 24; at the Grahamstown Festival on July 6, 7 and 8; and at the Momentum, State Theatre, Pretoria, from July 15 to 29