BAFANA KHUMALO showcases three rising stars who will be taking the stage at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival this week
IF a time capsule labelled “The new royalty in South African theatre” was launched into space at the opening of this year’s Grahamstown festival, included in it would be at least three names: Sello Maake ka Ncube, Pamela Nomvete and Owen Sejake.
A common thread runs through the impact these three performers have on the local theatre scene. They are up there with the best — yet in the past few years people would have paid them less than a passing glance.
Leading the pack is Maake ka Ncube. Despite the smooth himbo image he has acquired from his role in the local soapie Generations, he is far from brainless. If you want to trace his beginnings, take a look at the mounted posters displayed in the foyer of the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. One is of Woza Albert, which was touring Canada when the poster was printed. It shows a gap-toothed “struggle” actor named Sello Maake — that’s how the Canadians solved the problem of getting their tongues around a mouthful like Maake ka Ncube.
Born in Soweto, the actor is one of hundreds of performing artists trained under Gibson Kente — the playwright referred to by many as “the father of local black theatre”.
That was a very long time ago. Long before the tours abroad, and before accolades — including a best actor award for his portrayal of the betrayed husband in the stage version of Can Themba’s short story, The Suit — came his way. For Maake ka Ncube, the production was a turning point in his life. “I was going through an identity crisis,” he says. “I was doing parts where I was the only black person. I could not relate to any of the stories. I was even questioning my reasons for being an actor.”
At this point he discovered a book of short stories by Themba. He’d been browsing at Exclusive Books when they still had a branch in Hillbrow and stumbled upon it quite by accident. “Here was a man describing a life experience that I knew so well, but he was describing it in such exquisite language,” he says. He describes Themba as an emancipating discovery that came at a time when “we black actors were being looked down upon, not seen as cerebral. We were seen only as people with raised fists and dilated eyes, with no subtlety.”
It strikes me that Themba’s tale of love mutating into overbearance and leading to infidelity, revenge and the destruction of the one who arrogates that vengeance, must have been a difficult one to pull off on stage. This is a work written for the page, and one felt certain that the stage version would see it butchered beyond recognition. Yet, when Maake ka Ncube took to the stage at the 1994 Grahamstown Festival, Themba’s highly developed sense of description came alive. Every member of the audience could feel the hurt Philemon went through when he discovered that his wife had fallen for another man. How did the cast manage to pull it off? “It was Barney Simon’s brilliance — he took the story as it is and didn’t tamper with it.”
Somehow Maake ka Ncube still has that refreshing sense of self-doubt that many people seem to lose once they get to the top. Asked about rehearsals for this year’s festival piece, The Good Woman of Sharkville — an adaptation of Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan —by Janet Suzman and Gcina Mhlophe, he responds: “I’d rather we didn’t talk about it. I am still trying to find the character … I can always give you a soundbite and say it’s going great, but I don’t know …”
Another of the kings of the new mainstream is Owen Sejake. He started acting in 1971 and has played in everything from a Zulu TV version of Oedipus Rex to obscure French films. He seems surprised at my suggestion that he is reaching the top of his career on the local scene.
“I don’t think I can call myself that until I can reach the level of guys like bra Ken [Gampu], who started acting when things were really tough for black actors.”
Sejake has been in the trade for a while, and it seems surprising he has never really been “discovered” by the media. His is not a picture you see adorning the front page of a magazine, his private life exposed to the world.
“I come from a different school of thought. When I first started acting, I came into contact with people like the playwright Dukuza ka Macu, who had a different perspective on it all. He sees his role as being a mirror of the society that he lives in. For him, theatre is an exchange between himself and the audience.”
Sejake’s exchange with this year’s Grahamstown audience will occur in The Piano Lesson, by African- American playwright August Wilson. It’s a play about a family feud harking back to days of slavery and it rings particularly true for Sejake, who was “sold” in the Sixties, for a pass offence.
It is an American play and one of the most difficult aspects is getting the accent right, he says. Why, I want to know, should South African actors suffer the indignity of having to acquire an American accent? Why not play it with South African accents? “I accept that we have to retain something of ourselves, but when American actors perform South African plays I would expect that they would at least get the accent right,” he replies.
Enter the queen, Pamela Nomvete, starring opposite Maake ka Ncube in The Good Woman of Sharkville. Born in Ethiopia to South African parents in exile, she was educated in England and performed extensively in theatre across the UK. But then, in 1984, she packed her bags and headed back to the southern tip of Africa.
“It’s one of the best things I have ever done in my life,” she says of the move. Here, she says, she has met people who seem to have the same thoughts as she does. “Coming from Europe where their ways are so rigid, it’s difficult to make changes, unlike here, where there is an energy to make those changes.”
And it is this energy that has resulted in her and other colleagues forming a television production company. The birth of that company’s first baby is a brand new situation comedy set in Hilbrow and titled Flat 27. Listening to Nomvete speak, one is tempted to suggest that her success in this country is linked to the fact that she speaks in a manner reminiscent of an English school ma’am — particularly given this country’s love for that colonial link with the mother country. Does she feel this is the secret of her success?
“I see myself as being part of the continent. I do not regret my upbringing in any way,” she says emphatically. Her life, after all, doesn’t centre around being apologetic about the way she speaks.
“I think that in life you have a choice to accept who you are. I do not feel that I am out there to prove anything. If I walk into a place and people don’t accept me because of the way that I speak, that’s their problem.”
The Standard Bank National Festival opened on Thursday and runs until July 14. The Good Woman of Sharkville plays at the festival this weekend, then opens at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg on July 16. The Piano Lesson premieres in Grahamstown on July 12, moving to East London on July 20, the Vereeniging Civic Theatre on August 1, the State Theatre in Pretoria from August 7 and the Johannesburg Civic from September 4