The Mark Gevisser Profile
Since the Market Theatre opened in 1976, Janet Suzman has come home to do a play three times — almost exactly once a decade. And that, says theatre boss John Kani, is just about as much of her as they can take: “She’s a monster! An absolute monster! She presents a design for a set and we have to have an emergency meeting, she wants so much money! She refuses to compromise. Her motto is, `If you’re not going to do it properly, why do it at all?’
“She drives the production managers, she drives the set builders, she drives me crazy every day! I’m looking forward to the final day, when she gets on that plane back to London and we can go back to normal.”
Don’t be too alarmed. Kani and Suzman are great friends. This is the theatre, where there is constantly a tension between dramatic effect and true emotion. For her part, Suzman thinks the Market is “a mess”, languishing without “the informing spirit of Barney Simon”. She is beginning to find “rather tiresome” the “too many old things that prevail here” — like “the lack of punctuality”, which she finds “deeply irritating”, and the rather Luddite attitude towards technology. So scathing was she about how tatty the place was when she arrived a few weeks ago that the management have all clicked their heels and found the funds to repaint and refurbish it.
Gaunt and theatrical, hyper-articulate and hyperactive, the Market Theatre’s Mother Superior has swept back into town, to stage her adaptation of Brecht’s Good Woman of Szechuan. Her smoke-roughened laughter fills the empty spaces of Johannesburg’s once-celebrated centre of culture.
Giving notes to the cast of The Good Woman of Sharkville, which opens in Grahamstown this weekend before moving back to the Market, her ripostes to the actors are almost ribald. Then, quite unexpectedly, she’ll top a request with the interrogative “Yes?” — sibillant, lethal, a knife through the torpid air of a theatre in the mid- afternoon. So very British: I’m not going to order you to do this, but I dare you to refuse. There is something brassy about Janet Suzman — imperious and folksy in equal measure. The Grande Dame who knows what she wants, but who’s prepared to muck in to make it happen.
The Good Woman of Sharkville has a budget of half-a- million rand —tuppence-worth in Mbongeniland, but vast for a company that has lived, for the past two decades, by the barest of threads, the sharpest of wits, and the kindness of strangers. Particularly after last year’s disaster (don’t even say the words Titus Andronicus) from which no one —least of all Antony Sher himself — seems to have recovered, things are jittery indeed in the precints of the Market. Brecht? Could South African audiences — and black South African audiences in particular — ever find a way into this master’s dry, dialectical, discordant, Germanic theatre of alienation?
In the preview I saw — a week before the Grahamstown opening — things were still a bit rough, a little slow. But I sensed, along with the roaring crowd of black people drawn in by a competition in the Sowetan, impending triumph for Suzman and her crew. The production has something Titus missed by a mile: integrity. (In her terse, epigrammatic style, Suzman says she’s “not surprised” that Titus did so well in London, “a town full of intellectual wankers”.)
Rather than some expatriated vision, some interior struggle of guilt and displacement splayed on to a South African stage, Suzman has —for an expatriate — quite uncannily (and with some help from co-adaptor Gcina Mhlope) sussed this moment in our history and played right into it.
She has made of Sharkville a rich and ironic urban landscape, a backdrop to the fundamental —and very South African — questions that the play asks, fusing as only Brecht can, morality and materialism into a narrative condundrum: do you have to be bad to make it in an exploitative society?
“The Good Woman” is a prostitute who receives a bag of silver dollars from gods desperate to find some goodness on earth. Her naivety is quickly exploited; to save her skin — and what’s left of her wealth — she transforms into an evil and exploitative drug-peddling male cousin. “I love,” says Suzman, “the way the good person begins to enjoy the power that comes with being bad, and the way the bad person finds something inside him that is good.”
“The Good Woman”, played in this production by Pamela Nomvete, is one of the theatre’s great parts for women. Peggy Ashcroft did it, as did Suzman herself in 1978. She remembers seeing a production of it at the National Theatre in 1985. “It was interesting, but I sat there thinking, `Humph! Designer poverty.’
“I couldn’t get over the gap, the yawning abyss, between the comfortable, bored people sitting in the audience and what was being described on stage. I felt, there and then, that if I did it in South Africa, there’d be a colloquy between the stage and audience, a level of identification.”
Then she saw another London production of the play “that really gelled my ideas, done with only six actors on a bare stage with no set. Very Brechtian. We had a discussion afterwards and I said, `Yeah, you have to remember that in South Africa, wearing your own clothes and having no set is the going form. It’s not a conceit there. It’s altogether too spoilt, too luxurious to affect that.”
So what she has given South Africans —with the inspired help of designers Johan Engels and Sarah Roberts — is a vision that teeters somewhere between Dr Seuss and gangsta jive, getting the balance just right between what she calls “being user-friendly and slice-of-life enough to draw people in, but strange enough to not just be a sitcom … What I kept presenting to the actors is that these weren’t just ordinary, accessible, everyday street characters at all — they were distillations of people they knew, heated up to another dimension.”
Drawing precisely on the burlesque codes of South African township theatre (what was Woza Albert!, with its polemical storytelling, if not Brechtian?), she has crafted a truly South African play. Following John Ledwaba’s Jozi Jozi and the Itumeleng Motsikoe’s brilliant local production of The Coloured Museum, Sharkville brings textuality — the canon of great ideas — to the growing body of satiric urban picaresque that seems to be the best hope for a new South African theatre.
Perhaps, ventures John Kani, the reason for Suzman’s clarity of vision is her almost bluff straightforwardness, her lack of self-deception. He remembers his first meeting with her, in 1969, when they were introduced to each other by Athol Fugard on one of her frequent trips home: “We had a fantastic kick-off from the start. I said something to Winston [Ntshona] in Xhosa, and she accused me of being rude.
“I got furious: `You’ve been rude to my people for 300 fucking years — when did you learn my language?’ I expected her to back down, but she just came straight back at me and stood her ground!”
It’s been like that ever since between the two of them: “What I always appreciated about her was that she didn’t pretend to be a political exile or expatriate. She left [in 1960] for career reasons, and her attitude was, `Like me as I am, or don’t like me at all. I’m not going to pretend to be part of your struggle.’ … I used to see her as lily white, good natured, almost annoyingly naive in her idea that theatre was an art form and that’s it. But she’s growing. Today I don’t struggle to find a meeting-point with her. These days, she impresses me with her understanding of things.”
Suzman, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her role as the Tsarina in Nicholas and Alexandra, will admit freely that nothing has changed her life more than her experiences at the Market — first acting in The Death of Bessie Smith in 1977, then directing Othello with John Kani in 1987, and now with Sharkville. The woman who was central to the movement that modernised Shakespeare in the 1960s (she was, in fact, married to great director Trevor Nunn) will tell you that she is “infinitely happier” working with South African actors, “whose experience is minimal but [who have] an openness and sweetness of spirit and a hunger to try to make the day a nice day; I’m much more at home with that than with people [who are] into believing their own myth.”
But try to scratch deeper, and you come up against the fact that the woman opposite you is so experienced at celebrity that the conversation you are having is a performance of intimacy, rather than intimacy itself. Five times, in five different ways, I asked her how she related, personally, to the moral issues raised by the Good Woman. Five times, she skilfully evaded me.
In her book, Acting with Shakespeare — The Comedies, to be launched in South Africa later this month, she describes the difference between watching, on television, “real people … being interviewed” and “actors pretending to be real people”. Actors “sound almost too good to be true: too inflected, too colourful, too dramatic, too cogent. Real people speak more simply, more monotonously …”
Based on my few hours with Janet Suzman, I would venture to suggest that she is writing, here, about a dilemma, between being a real person and being an actress, she carries within herself. We had a fascinating conversation about theatre. She was inflected, colourful, dramatic, cogent — and more: she was one of the sharpest intellects I have encountered in a long time, and one of the best, driest wags. But she ventured nothing about herself.
On the cover of her book she has chosen to place, from her illustrious album of Royal Shakespeare Company credits, a photograph of herself as Beatrice opposite Alan Howard’s Benedick in a 1967 production of Much Ado About Nothing. It makes perfect sense to me that she would choose feisty, difficult Beatrice as her signature rather than, say, the wimpy, love- smitten Rosalind she was to play in All’s Well That Ends Well a year later. Janet Suzman is as far away from self-indulgence as Beatrice is from Rosalind: tough, prickly and cerebral, she masks, like Beatrice, her emotions — and maybe even her pain — with her fluency.
Look out for Portraits of Power, a collection of Mark Gevisser’s profiles, published by David Philip
Two kings and a queen, PAGE 31