Shaun de Waal
BORN IN THE RSA: FOUR WORKSHOPPED PLAYS by Barney Simon (Witwatersrand University Press, R39,95)
LIKE Joan Littlewood, with whom he worked, and Athol Fugard, to whom he was close, Barney Simon made theatre out of a process of bringing real life as directly as possible to the stage.
Simon’s actor-collaborators would be sent out into the streets and the bars to research their roles, to develop life- stories for the characters they would portray. And those biographies would become the basic material for such a play: in the case of Black Dog/Inj’emnyama, the first text in this book, they form the substance of the play, with the characters telling their stories directly to the audience.
By contrast, Outers, a play based on recordings of Johannesburg tramps made by Nicky Rebelo, is almost all dialogue. The gritty, colloquial exchanges in the piece seem to have been dragged straight off the appropriate park benches, but clearly a lot of crucial shaping and editing was done to turn research into theatre.
Ironically, as Pat Schwartz’s excellent introduction notes, this is the play in which we especially want biographies for the characters – we want to know how they landed on their park benches. Then again, the unanswered questions do add to the power of a piece that, for all its realism, has resonances with the stark puzzles of absurdist theatre.
What all the plays here have in common – though it comes to a particularly poignant peak, I think, in Score Me the Ages (1989) – is the dedication to the particularities of language. Simon’s 1974 collection of stories, Joburg Sis!, showed a fondness for the monologue and his concomitant concern with voice. Each character’s use of language, of slang and accent, reveals something about his or her society even as it delineates the individual.
This technique had an extra punch at a time and in a society in which so many people’s stories had been suppressed or had been deemed inconsequential, but it also demonstrates Simon’s fundamental humanism. In the end, he was more interested in people than ideas, and he saw that more than any other single thing it is language which constitutes a character.
Born in the RSA, first performed in 1985, is generally regarded as Simon’s masterpiece, a “living newspaper” that convincingly served up a slice of South African mid-Eighties life. Here, the biographies and the dialogue are well integrated into the action of the play as a whole, and the reality that underpinned (and over-arched) the work contributed to its considerable impact on stage.
The play’s final scene, in which a group of imprisoned women activists meet unexpectedly and burst into freedom-songs, has been accused of being an artificial resolution, and it does have a touch of agit-prop about it. But it is as good a way as any to end a Barney Simon workshopped play; it appears he often had trouble with endings.
But perhaps that’s why the characters in these plays seemed so real, seemed to carry on living when the audience had left the theatre.