The svelte HAZEL FRIEDMAN goes out and gorges herself on Feedback
Andrew Buckland’s mother would be forgiven for thinking that maybe, just maybe, her multi-talented son harbours repressed feelings of hostility towards her. I mean, carving up your mother’s corpse and turning her anatomical parts – breasts, boep, bum ‘n’ all – into gastronomical delights – raises questions of a Freudian nature.
While his award-winning play Feedback makes more than the occasional reference to oral fixations on the part of Buckland and his partner in comic crime, Lionel Newton, there’s nothing overtly autobiographical in its content.
“I called me mum up and told her she shouldn’t take it personally,” he explains, alternating between an endearing mix of public school pronunciation and cockney- speak. “She didn’t, although she was worried that people would be reluctant to come and see it.” But Feedback has proved palatable to even the most ardent of family values activists.
In 1994 it won Buckland an FNB Vita Award for Best Playwright and a Fringe First Award at the 1995 Edinburgh Festival. And in Johannesburg, where audiences are top of the endangered species list, it is one of the few productions that can boast a 75% attendance average.
Directed by Janet Buckland, Feedback follows the food-friendly trail of brothers Birth and Mirth from the Feedback Shelter. Together with Detective Deadly Serious they set out to solve the murder of their beloved Mother Mirth, defeat the Greedy D’Earth Foodstuff Multinational and liberate the revolting food. But Feedback’s message isn’t simply that Noshtalgia ain’t what it used to be.
It provides an entertaining allegory on the evils of avarice and food for thought on contemporary social issues. And its charm doesn’t merely lie in the fact that with its predilections for lavatorial humour, spurts of projectile vomiting and audience abuse, it attaches itself to our baser instincts like mould to blue cheese.
It is Steven Spielberg and Walt Disney without the special effects – an epic action-cartoon in 3-D and an adventure book written with movements that paint sweeping, kaleidoscopic landscapes inhabited by flying members of the kilojoule kingdom.
And right now, the Bucklandeer and the Newton Bomb are burning up the calories in a bout of performance foreplay, stretching supple limbs, contorting elasticized facial muscles, wheezing (Newton), grunting (Buckland) and engaging in a bit of banter about the virtues of taking a sheila (a shit) and making dramatic episodes of puking – “a symptom of pre-performance nerves,” Newton explains.
They’re a strangely well-suited duo. Newton, the product of a Cockney-Boer union, and winner of the M-Net All Africa Film Award for Best Leading Actor, possesses a delinquent, Dennis the Menace charm. Buckland combines a Hugh Grant caught with his pants down demeanour with a rubber body and a chin made in cartoon heaven.
Both are blessed with an almost perverse amount of talent. Both have a combination of passion and gentleness and are equally capable of donning nappies and slipping seamlessly from buffoonery to heroism.Onstage one almost can almost touch the invisible umbilicus feeding into and off one another, as they alternate characters like victims of multiple personality disorder.
“Lionel has such intense concentration and control. He’s always adding something new,” says Buckland, himself a master of mutation.
“I sometimes worry that in Grahamstown (where he teaches drama at Rhodes University) change and growth is less possible because my responsibilities extend primarily to the development of my students and not my own work.”
But stasis is something that Buckland is unlikely to experience, given the “my wife- my mentor-my Mussolini” relationship he shares with director-spouse Janet. “She can be pretty harsh because she doesn’t allow me to stay in the same place. If what I’m trying to do isn’t spelt out clearly enough to her, she’ll simply say: ‘This is shit. Give me something else.’ And if it works for her, it usually works for everybody.”
Newton also seem to enjoy a similar symbiosis with spouse Lara Foot Newton – who will direct him and Buckland in Samuel Beckett’s End Game at the Market Theatre later this year.
And on stage he and Buckland become that two-person strike force, transforming a prop-less arena into a food fantasia.
Feedback can be seen at the Civic Theatre in Johannesburg until February 1