THEATRE: Lesley Marx
‘IF you want to film a definition of irony,” Brian Astbury tells me, ”do it here.” The point is well taken. He has been directing David Mowat’s The Guise for Capab Drama. The Guise was the last play to be banned at The Space theatre nearly two decades ago. The Space itself represented everything that state-subsidized theatre resisted. Now those subsidies have been cut and we are watching the last production of Capab Drama and it is The Guise.
Mowat sets The Guise in London 1642, after the closing of the theatres by the Puritans. The plot concerns a theatre company that struggles to survive. Richard Daborne, leader of the troupe, is staging a play, also called The Guise. They suffer raids, arrests and increasing poverty, and Daborne’s wife, living in sordid conditions, bears the brunt of the struggle, constantly harassed by thugs in search of prostitutes.
A complication of time frames is achieved by setting all these events in the immediate past, as Daborne’s company analyses what happened to them through monologues addressed to the audience, and through satirical re-enactments of the kinds of theatre that were permitted.
At various points, we are also reminded that we are watching a performance by contemporaries. So the company straddles the 17th and 20th centuries and foregrounds the relevance of the past to the present.
The most disturbing scenes are those of the psychic torment inflicted on Daborne as he tries to plead his case before the impassive Prynne, and the more spectacular violence of the rape of Daborne’s wife. Banned at The Space 18 years ago because it contravened the clause concerning indecency, obscenity and offensiveness to public morals, the play’s real offense is against the very notion of censorship, a metaphoric rape of freedom of expression.
On returning to England in the Eighties, Astbury found that financial cuts were effecting their own kind of censorship, and he turned to The Guise once more for an expression of the need for theatre.
He has directed it for his students at the Mountview Theatre School and they have toured it through the United Kingdom, Romania, Hong Kong and the United States, discovering its resonance with each of these societies. Astbury suggests that bringing it back to Cape Town offers more than nostalgia. Going back to The Space through this play is like returning to the womb, and finding that, 25 years later, the play still has relevance.
The current cast is superb. They mutate from slapstick comedy to Brechtian alienation strategies to the harrowing violence of Edward Bond in a riveting production – all three hours of it. It is to the credit of the company that they should bring Capab Drama to such an explosive close.
The Guise runs until May 17 at the Nico Malan theatre in Cape Town