Theatre: David Le Page
Raiders of the Lost Count is a play play, so silly that one is astonished by the fact that one is watching what appear to be adults performing it and by the extent to which they have liberated child-like imaginations. It’s tremendously exhilarating watching actors having so much fun. It’s not great theatre, but it is very refreshing theatre, with some great moments.
Raiders’ opening is typical of its informality. To the strains of the wonderful Indiana Jones theme, director Nicholas Ellenbogen and his cast (Esmael Texeira, Nhlanhla Mavundla, Roger Lucey and Patrick Mofokeng) bound onto the stage and he introduces them all, but before things get under way, industrial relations fracture, the cast sulks and Ellenbogen has to puzzle out a way to get them to continue with the play.
The story is of the quest of April, a stripper from District Six, to seek out her lover, the Count, who has been abducted by the dreaded Bali Omar, and is part of a slave train somewhere in East Africa. April being in Cape Town, she needs transport to find him, which she acquires by knocking out some pillar of the Empire aviator and taking his Tiger Moth biplane north into darkest Africa, where after enlisting various allies, frustrating plans for germ warfare and many other adventures she triumphs in her mission.
This narrative is framed by another, that of the Count’s long-lost son going to Paris to meet his aged father, who relates to him this tale of the valiant April.
Of course, plane trips, plains and deserts, mountain strongholds and the Eiffel Tower would usually pose some problems of staging. Ellenbogen and his crew use a variety of methods to represent these things; a table with a pulley running off it becomes Table Mountain, a plank across a long chair becomes the Tiger Moth, known affectionately as the Aardvark; at other times, the Aardvark is a matchbox toy.
Visual puns abound: a French housekeeper literally has her hair tied up in a bun, a heartless swine has to spit out the pulsating organ, a self-portrait of the Count is created simply by having him peer through a picture frame.
The actors play charades, play the fool, and quite literally play with fire; fireworks, candles, burning models, all go up in flames during the show.
They use lighting (by Karen Cutts) effectively as well, particularly in an underwater scene, though here there was some unexplained inconsistency; a later underwater scene didn’t use the same lighting, without any reason being apparent.
Their modelling of large-scale things and events is always ingenious, and sometimes rather beautiful, as when a jumbo jet lands at Cape Town Airport towards the end.
They make some use of narrative to connect episodes, a technique of Radio Theatre, from which tradition they draw some cliched musical effects: at appropriately suspenseful moments, the cast draws together for a “Dum, da-dum dum daa!” chorus.
The language isn’t always pristine, and you may have to keep your offspring well away from matches for a few weeks, but Raiders of the Lost Count is a wonderful show for parents who’d like to take their children to the theatre, without being bored silly themselves.
The only question is whether we should be paying when the cast, if anything, is enjoying itself even more than we are!
Raiders of the Lost Count runs at the Market, Newtown, until October 30
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