THEATRE: Charl Blignaut
IT wasn’t the lingering threat of a neurotic, gun- toting woman trying to claw the truth from a terrified fascist she’d tied to a chair for 24 hours that had me rattled as I left the Windybrow Centre for the Arts the other night. It wasn’t even the sinking realisation that there are only six individuals left willing to brave a Johannesburg Saturday night for the love of theatre. Nor, for that matter, was it the ridiculous number of spelling mistakes in the programme. What really had me shaken was that the person who went with me to Death and the Maiden had no idea, by the end of it all, that he’d just been watching one of the most brilliant political thrillers of the decade. The truth is he’d barely managed to stay awake.
It would be easy to slate the production as badly realised, trite and artistically beige — because, to the critical eye, it is all that. The real problem runs deeper than mere production values. It’s a problem that has to do with local theatre finding its audience; with slashed budgets and development, and the impossible phase in which an inner-city people’s theatre finds itself.
Not content to dish out imported, Eurocentric escapism, the Windybrow has — justifiably — embarked on a mission to produce relevant entertainment that will appeal to the community. And in order to fulfil this mandate they have shifted Ariel Dorfman’s subtle cocktail of truth and lies in a Chile emerging from the brutality of Pinochet’s dictatorship away from its original context and into present-day South Africa and its Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
When the play first emerged in the early 1990s, it became an overnight classic with its simple story about the realities of political power. It involves a married couple who have survived the struggle: he is on the way up, a lawyer about to take a position with the new government; she is a mess, unable to purge the brutality of the past — she’d been blindfolded, tortured and raped at the hands of the old guard.
One night a stranger visits and she, on hearing his voice, is convinced this is her former torturer. She proceeds to put him on trial instead of waiting for some or other commission. Has she cracked or is he really the bastard who stole her dreams? Here, at last, was that rare mix of human drama and political intrigue able to bring home the complexities of revolution and reconciliation.
So, when Barney Simon first staged the work in South Africa, it offered a shrieking similarity to our situation. It was intriguing to draw the parallels and to sense a bigger political picture emerge.
In the quest for relevance, the Windybrow production instead highlights the political lesson over the emotional intrigue. They have stripped the realism down to symbolic gestures, sets and costumes. In attempting to achieve the kind of simplicity that will draw an emerging audience, director Damon Berry has all but killed those aspects of theatre that inspire us to buy a ticket in the first place: the artistry of spectacle and the illusion of the acted. Against his best intentions, he has robbed us of our delight at being transported.
Death and the Maiden is at the Windybrow in Hillbrow until August 24