THEATRE: Andrew Wilson
BEWARE – there’s a Nineties white male troopie on the loose: marginalised and misunderstood by a fickle, changing political landscape, and with no enemy left, he comes armed with insight, despair, and a kit-bag full of anecdotes.
Currently on at the Civic, Greig Coetzee’s White Men With Weapons is less a play about overt militarism than it is a cry against politics. Fed on Eighties propaganda in the Nineties context, a soldier at the start of the decade is a warrior without a war. In this production, the purpose and focus of the Eighties conscript with his anger and hurt, seen in Mre is ‘n Lang Dag (1985) and Somewhere On The Border (1988), gives way to introspection and the realisation that the army is no longer priority number one, and that the world outside the military has the power to play cat-and-mouse with it.
Where a wounded soldier might receive compensation and counselling, the sidelined transitional troopie knows only one thing: a hero he is not. And no one is telling him why.
While the script touches on the nature of the military mind, and the relationship between state and military and church and military, it is essentially more about being a pawn in a game than about questioning the ethics of an enforced patriotism. The text’s honesty and simple focus gives it a strength founded not only on its avoidance of sentiment, but also on its refusal to moralise. It provides an uncluttered and often hilarious look at the confusion and psychological scarring left in the wake of transition.
Through a platoon of characters, the audience is led on a one-man journey of mattress-biting, township patrols and church parades where, once the military machine’s raison d’etre is removed, a generation of soldiers and conscripts find themselves marooned and impotent, jettisoned by politics without even Esm Everard for comfort.
Actor Greig Coetzee, like a chameleon on cocaine, swops characters and anecdotes in a controlled and totally compelling performance enhanced by Garth Anderson’s sharp-focused direction.
Coetzee’s White Men With Weapons sees a conscript playing a game with arbitrary rules in an arena of shifting parameters, and is successful because it documents rather than excuses, and ends up stating rather than pontificating.
White Men with Weapons is on at the Civic Theatre until December 21