The Market’s new play is set in the Big Top, without words — just the sound of a violin. Janet Smith spoke to star Sue Pam- Grant
When you’re a kid, you don’t notice the inevitable mud that accompanies a circus because some soft adult is lugging you through the brown slush towards the glitter and the canned music and the fairy lights strung for miles.
Later, as a parent indulgent enough to cash in for popcorn and candy-floss and cheap plastic acrobats that crawl up the side of candy tubes, the mud seems everywhere. The East Rand accent of the ringmaster rubs like sandpaper on the eardrum and the lady with the snake has taken on an oily sheen.
Yet the circus is the circus of the child in Fall, I Catch You, a scintillating new play opening at the Market Theatre on January 15. It’s the mecca of nightmares and dreams and symbolic encounters and wire-walking that collects a communal gasp. No mud. Just universal gestures that take us inside a world without language that speaks of romance and longing.
Sue Pam-Grant might as well have fallen, it seems, into that ethereal oneness that is neither of this world nor of another. She plays Livia, a tightrope artiste whose love affair with another performer incites the fury of the circus boss — their entanglement observed from the edges by the circus cleaner. She also plays that side of ourselves that begs for a sliver of heaven in the awful darkness.
Fall, I Catch You seems to have wrapped Pam-Grant in velvet so lustrous it pains one to touch it. She’s unexpected, like any truly great circus performer. She wafts through her conversation like she’s drifting on a white pony in a cloud of air.
Any unwitting Suburban Bliss fan would scarcely recognise the Kobie of their imagination. There are no cigarettes, there is no screaming red hair and no curvaceous tongue. It’s as if the character who became so beloved so fast, so much part of the South African pop culture vocabulary, has vanished like the last image on the screen before the set is switched off.
It’s a beautiful disappearance, really. Pam-Grant seems to be re-emerging as an actress and writer with a gentle power so alluring it catches you in your throat.
“This play explores the fragility of life,” she tells. “The balancing act, the dream of flying, the feather which can blow away and float — or fall.”
Right now, the quality to which she aspires after the crassness of fame that came with Suburban Bliss — one of the most successful South African television shows ever — is to fly. She’s longing to relocate the areas in herself that are about love and tranquility, and it’s been a life-changing trip to get to where she is now, back home on stage working in a production that surely rushes on the speed of her talent.
Fall, I Catch You carries an irresistible lilt in descriptions of itself. A ramshackle European circus — comprising a Nigerian dwarf (played by Tshepo Maseko), a goddess acrobat, a vicious owner (Philippa de Villiers) and a labourer voyeur (Toni Morkel) — arrives in Africa with a haughty bearing that considers itself art. Loosely based on a short story by De Villiers — who is now also something of a TV star after appearing in SABC3’s Theatresports — the play’s allure is heightened by the strange and compelling sound of an electric violin, played by British jazzist Hannah Kantazi.
Pam-Grant has no difficulty traipsing delicately in silence, as this piece demands. Her astounding achievement with the Market Theatre’s Take the Floor — an unforgettable evening of dancing and loneliness — remains a heady memory among theatregoers. She loves it, too. And like that serendipitous event which came at a time when Gauteng theatre was struggling with a retro conscience and at pains to find a path, Fall, I Catch You introduces a microcosm by which we can examine ourselves.
“It has a very dark edge,” she says, “the flip side of the ring and the realm of light. We see the other side, so muddy it stinks. The play completely demystifies that world through the crack of the circus tent, out back behind the curtain. It’s extremely beautiful to watch, it’s visually very challenging, but more than anything, it’s a personal exploration, symbolising that place inside of all of us that is broken and splintered.”
Perhaps that place is more real for Pam- Grant than before. She had a tough year last year, rescued always by the astonishing love affair she has with DJ, her husband of 10 years. Although she wouldn’t necessarily tell it this way, insiders insist the SABC duped her and her collaborators out of a promising comedy show for which scripts had been commissioned and written. She says it was a disappointing moment. Others would say it was yet another act of cruelty by an SABC with a reputation for picking up small, lovely creatures like a burly giant and dropping them into a crevice from which they are unable to crawl.
There are also stories that Pam-Grant was not allowed to audition for another SABC series — ironically, about a hairdresser, just like her major 1980s stage hit Curl Up `n’ Dye — because of Suburban Bliss. These are obviously incidents anyone would wish to wave away. She almost does.
“What fascinates me now is personal relationships,” she continues. “The clockwork of relationships like mine, which still intrigues me. I want to act in a real love story, not just the stuff about pretty people. Right now, everything I’ve done for the past couple of years on television is quite far away, and I’m not trying to recapture the past before that, but I know where I want to go and what I want to do.”
Rough, sexy theatre was licked and tasted at the Market Theatre and the Civic Theatre last year, but Pam-Grant is not convinced theatregoers or actors can mainline on plays like Mojo and Bouncers for long.
“It’s not only about pandering to an audience. It’s also very important that producers develop a new stage language that is evocative enough to become a drawcard like Brett Bailey’s iMumbo Jumbo. We have to weather that wind on which the feather floats, flies or drops to earth, like it is in Fall, I Catch You.”
She admits it’s been hard to “get back in” after Suburban Bliss. More than that, it’s been hard “to find what to do, what to say, to keep the creative heart pumping”. Fortunately for the great number of cynics who are among her most distinctive fans, Pam-Grant is not New Age about either her life or her vocation (yoga at the Buddhist Centre doesn’t count).
“I suppose I could say I’m searching, but I’m in a really nice, calm place now, and I like it.”
— Fall, I Catch You runs at the Barney Simon Theatre in the Market Theatre complex from January 15 to February 21