BAFANA KHUMALO follows a new musical drama, One Voice, through two performances — one in Soweto and the other at the Civic Theatre
FRIDAY morning at the Market Theatre complex, Johannesburg. A bearded, pipe-smoking man is trying to contain himself. The source of his discomfort is the cast of a play who are drifting in with varying degrees of tardiness. “We really need to give them a talking to this time, we are professionals you know,” he says to a young publicist who’s been buzzing around the office seemingly not achieving anything.
Ryk Hattingh settles himself down on the concrete ground and lights his pipe. He’s the director of One Voice, a workshopped musical drama billed on the Arts Alive festival.
While the idea behind One Voice is ultimately to be found within Hattingh’s bearded persona, the real creators are the actors themselves. Ten high school children first met in June and, through a process of exploration, learned to trust one another and eventually tell the diverse tales of growing up in turbulent times. On hearing the concept, one can’t help but wonder whether this was an attempt to imitate Athol Fugard’s 1995 hit, Valley Song. “No,” is Hattingh’s emphatic answer, “he [Fugard] had a lot of time, so he could get the kids to keep diaries, which I did not have.”
Hattingh had only three months to audition 40 children and out of these choose a cast. “Do you want a racial breakdown? ” he asks, a cynical smile hovering at the corner of his mouth. “Six black, two coloured, one white and one Indian.”
They are scheduled to perform in Tladi in Soweto and one of the cast members is late beyond embarrassment. Hattingh wonders out loud whether or not the play can go on without her. While we wait we speak about who he is, as an Afrikaner intellectual who was involved in the process that ultimately helped destigmatise the language in the eyes of many lefties.
His play, Sing Jy Van Bomme (1988), caused quite a stir with its scathing criticism of the SA military. A career that spans publishing and writing has included stints with the now defunct alternative Afrikaans weeklies, Vrye Weekblad and Die Suid Afrikaan. And then a particularly strange career move; editing an Afrikaans porno magazine, Loslyf. “Afrikaners have always been portrayed as khaki-clad repressed people and I wanted to show them as normal, sexual, fucking human beings”.
The missing cast member arrives — she had a surprise test at school. All is forgiven and the show can go on. The venue is Prudence High School, a dress rehearsal. On the drive over to Soweto, Hattingh had been wondering whether the venue would prove good enough. He knows that it is not exactly going to be Broadway, but hopes that it’ll be better than he suspects.
His instinct is right — it’s quite terrible; an outdoor venue with the audience a group of high school pupils waiting to attend a fund-raising event. They would far rather be listening to Whitney Houston than to Nonini Nquma tell how her father was tortured by the security branch; are visibly uninterested in Laurence Horn’s poignant travelogue through the journey of his abandonment by his parents. After the performance, Horn seems quite hurt by the reaction but tries to be adult about it: “I understand where they come from. Why should they be interested in the life of a whitey who was left by his parents … ”
Throughout the performance Hattingh is a bundle of nerves, listening to every word “the kids” utter from the makeshift stage. “She started that in the wrong key,” he says, half to himself, as Thobeka Gumede powers through a religious song. If she did, no one noticed, because this young woman has a voice so charged it is almost upsetting. It’s the kind of voice that saps one’s emotions while feeding the soul. She holds the restless audience’s attention quite admirably with her tale of how her older brother, an ANC member, was abducted and later found murdered in a sports field. She says that she has forgiven her brother’s killers, “I don’t know how, but I have … ” It is just a pity that the audience is not very appreciative of the depth of her emotion and at what it took to get it all out.
Later we all sit at the Wimpy and the heart-rending stories seem to fade as the cast dance to piped music, a song called Thobeka by Boom Shaka. They have become teenagers again.
They are still quite excited by having actually performed in front of a real audience. That there were no acoustics to speak of doesn’t seem to diminish the thrill of having told a story and sung and rapped. Rap? Somehow the rap seemed out of place in a collection of songs ranging from choral to traditional. I ask Hattingh about it. “The kids absolutely insisted on including rap,” he says.
After the baptism by fire in Soweto, the next performance is scheduled for the following day at the Civic Theatre. This is to be a walk in the park by comparison and some of the proud parents are present to see their children on stage.
With the professional facilities and the girls all made up, the two performances are worlds apart. The play hasn’t lost its edge, but everything goes smoothly in front of a decidedly more restrained audience that claps in all the right places even though it might not fully understand where the music is coming from. Fifty-five minutes and it is all over.
“So what is going to happen to these kids after these performances?” I had asked after the Soweto show. “It’s not in my hands. Some of them would like to continue in the theatre and others don’t … I would not have liked that this raw talent be left to go to waste,” Hattingh had said.
It’s this talent that has told a story with the power to touch someone so profoundly that he felt it should be heard by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After seeing the Saturday evening show, Hugh Lewin of the TRC has subsequently arranged that exactly that happen.
One Voice will be staged at various venues until September 27. Call 838-4563 for details