Matthew Krouse
OPEN SPACE: SIX CONTEMPORARY PLAYS FROM AFRICA edited and with an introduction by Yvette Hutchinson and Kole Omotoso (Kagiso, R42,95)
MY LIFE AND VALLEY SONG by Athol Fugard (Hodder & Stoughton/ Witwatersrand University Press R25,95)
TRAITOR ON THE ICE by John Kench (Mallard, R35)
IT requires a certain commitment and patience to obtain and read plays, so it would seem to be a small miracle that local publishers continue, year after year, to offer drama to an ever-slackening reading public.
Three books of plays, published this year, are examples of what is considered by publishers’ editors as worthwhile material in this domain.
Open Space, edited by Yvette Hutchinson and Kole Omotoso, claims to not offer a defence of particular cultural practices but rather to explain how it is that African drama came to be what it is. The introduction situates its content, in the routines of African daily life where rituals are still valid and are still believed in.
The intended reader – the drama student – is offered a method of analysing and contextualising plays with consideration to structure, plot and the playwright’s point of view.
The selected texts help build an understanding of African drama. There are explorations of colonialism from different corners of the continent in Reza de Wet’s A Worm in the Bud and Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy, while economic problems in contemporary Africa are investigated in Zakes Mda’s The Hill and Tewfik Al-Hakim’s The Donkey Market.
Exotic ritual, political satire and questions of gender are also features of the six plays of Open Space. Each is individually introduced to offer the student a well-rounded insight into the commonality of a drama that has retained an African identity despite exposure to European forms.
Athol Fugard, on the other hand, has recently taken off on a road of his own. Concentrating his efforts on a variety of youthful experiences – particularly those of young women – he has begun a cycle of plays that evoke the type of workshopped drama undertaken by groups of actors in the late Seventies and early Eighties, a style of which Fugard was an important forebear.
In his plays My Life and Valley Song, Fugard claims to enter into a dialogue with his girls, employing no fixed agenda, using diaries in which the youngsters express their hopes, dreams, fears and nightmares. The result is two plays (which were staged) that are charming, naive and sincere. What can be gleaned is that the young women’s transitions from girlhood to adulthood are used as a metaphor for South Africa’s democratic coming of age.
Although it is doubtful whether theatre practitioners will use the text to restage these plays, the background notes to the productions, as well as the interview conducted by Witwatersrand University Press managing editor Pat Schwartz with Fugard, indicate a means of achieving a form of performance text, and a style that is accessible to all.
Fugard has definitely softened with age, and his seasoned system of achieving his ends stands as an example to educators of how to deal with the complexities of South African experience. But what both Open Space and My Life display is an underlying anxiety which peppers the creative expression of all those who dwell on our continent. Even Fugard’s young women tell stories of conflict between the traditional and the contemporary, and one senses a deep-seated fear of patriarchy in traditional family environments.
By contrast, John Kench’s Traitor on the Ice is an unperformed text. Set in the Arctic circle, it concerns three Russian explorers who are on an expedition to test the powers of the “new Soviet man” under extreme conditions.
What follows is a somewhat satirical play – based on the real-life adventures of the Soviet explorer Ivan Papanin – that is supposed to be a type of Three Stooges on ice. References are made to “Comrade Stalin” throughout, and it becomes obvious that Kench – known for his books on South African furniture and wines – has a big problem with archaic communism.
Moments of intended humour fail as the three characters bumble their way through the Arctic. Traitor on the Ice is a non-starter which will probably gather a lot of dust.
The publishing of drama is a complex field, one often undertaken by publishers as an act of faith. It is interesting to note, then, how faithful publishers are to their playwrights, reproducing their new works, year after year.