Playwright Paul Slabolepszy has had 22 plays staged in almost as many years. So why, asks Charl Blignaut, does he have to impersonate Naas Botha at rugby matches to pay the bills?
‘All I actually want to do is stay home at the computer and write,” says Paul Slabolepszy once we have settled in as best we can for an interview in the outdoor sauna that is Johannesburg’s Market Theatre precinct in the middle of a minor national heatwave.
“But unless you’re Athol Fugard and you’re collecting royalties from having your plays performed all around the world, you end up having to do kak to get by.”
“So what does a leading South African playwright do to pay the rent?” I ask.
Slab scrunches up his face. At first I think his expression is a result of the rays of midday sunlight splintering off the paving, but no, he’s recalling a recent crowd-warmer at a rugby match.
“I stick Naas Botha teeth in my mouth, troop on to the field and act like a fokken moegoe in front of 2 000 people.”
Ah.
“It’s a sad state of affairs. I always say to Bill [Flynn, fellow comic actor], ‘Robert Redford would not have to do these things.’ But this is South Africa, we don’t value our playwrights and we don’t invest in the theatre. Most of the time I do what is called ‘industrial cabaret’. “
“Industrial cabaret?”
“Corporate theatre. I do things like wear a nappy in front of the employees as part of a training initiative. You have no idea what that’s like until you try it.”
Crazy as it seems, Slabolepszy’s new play, Fordburg’s Finest, was really dependent on the outcome of the rugby world cup. He had written a play called Heel against the Head to co-incide with the tournament and if South Africa won he knew there would be enough interest to sustain the play long enough to stay home and write something bigger and deeper. Needless to say South Africa won and Fordsburg’s Finest can this week be seen on the main stage of the Market with a huge, elaborate set and a cast that includes Marius Weyers and American Dorcas M Johnson.
She plays Thandi, a returned exile who, in search of her parents’ former Kofifi home, finds instead Foxy Freddie’s second-hand car lot. She runs smack bang into the domain of white Afrikaner paternalism (Weyers) and his white trash breeker brother Rocco (Slabolepszy). Foxy Freddie takes the opportunity to prove to her that he’s an okay kinda guy, not the bastard who used to serve on the police force and flatten houses in Kofifi and Sophiatown.
It’s not the world cup, but it’s still very common man, very Arthur Miller, dotted with enough “fucks” to satisfy even David Mamet. That’s Paul Slabolepszy for you. The man who can take the common interests of the drinking classes and turn them into engaging theatre.
He’s always been a bit of an oke. “I used to go straight from rugby practice to putting on make-up for rehearsals when I was studying at University of Cape Town. To this day Ralph Lawson will tell you how he used to hold his nose when I came into the dressing room … “
It seems ridiculous that Slabolepszy is still struggling today when, as a young playwright, he rose on the back of the censorship struggles that punctuated the National Party’s various states of emergency. He was one of the dirty communist permissives that so offended the state president in Dieter Reible’s Othello for the opening of the Nico Malan theatre in Cape Town. The next day the newspapers reported that the president wanted Reible deported. Asap.
“I remember we were rehearsing Session in Pretoria and one day these 11 suits filed into the auditorium and sat down. What’s going on, I wondered, but we carried on doing our lines, fok this and piss that … and suddenly Ken [Leach, director] comes up to us and says ‘Uh, guys, let’s drop that fuck there’. I went ballistic. I went crazy and started screaming. How could we express ourselves if we weren’t allowed to use the language that the characters would use? It happened again when I was doing Jo’burg Sis! in Cape Town. I got a telegram instructing me to cut the following lines. One of them was a scene where I describe a policeman having sex with a black woman. In the end I mimed the action, kind of nudge nudge. I got a telegram instructing me to remove the lewd gestures …
“Those experiences had a lot to do with why I started writing in the first place. It was a kind of defiance, creating plays like Saturday Night at the Palace.”
This week Slabolepszy turns 50 but he still looks like the 30-year old of Saturday Night. He’s wearing his trademark white hair long and it tickles the back of his neck like a mosquito in the paralysing heat. That’s because he has to scrape it into a white-trash ponytail every night to become Rocco, Foxy Freddie’s brother. Rocco stumbles around like a lost fascist biker, the kind of white supremacist pig who likes to sleep with the domestic.
“I wanted him to be her worst nightmare,” says Slab. “I wanted her to realise that her dreams of a homeland and the big, blue African sky are just a romantic notion.” Auditioning black actors for the role in New York, Slab says they all wanted to read the climactic emotional scene where she rediscovers her African heritage. “The whole African American thing is bollocks. I love it when Morgan Freeman said ‘I’m an American and that’s that.’ “
Watching Fordsburg’s Finest’s very first preview the night before, I wonder if we really need another “reconciliation play” so ominously similar in structure and tone to Fugard’s Playland that was performed in the same theatre a few years back. But Slabolepszy insists his play has gone beyond that. That it’s “as much about America as it is about South Africa.
“I wanted to explore the idea of belonging and roots,” he says, “I grew up as a soutie in the heart of vrot AWB-land in the Northern Transvaal. My father was a polish pilot and I was born in London, so I never had the sense that I belonged. There’s a lot of me in Thandi’s story, the displaced exile.
“But there’s a line in the play that goes: ‘There’s no pain in not belonging. Just a sense of emptiness’. At best we can fill the emptiness, you know.”
I picture Slabolepszy in front of his computer, living on the borrowed time of the world cup, trying to fill the boots of the mature playwright. The one that tries to make sense of his heritage and where the country is at, who knows it is time to tackle the bigger issues. His process has moved from anger to resolution.
“I wanted to deal with the thing of one’s homeland. Where is it if it’s not where Thandi hoped to find it; under her feet? Is it here [touching his head] or here [his heart]?”
What Slabolepszy wants to say is that we must deal with our past. That there is not some mythical, greener pasture on the other side.
“My next play,” he says as I drain my third cold drink and wish I was sitting watching the snow fall in an East Village diner rather than the heat rise off the Newtown paving, “is about that. It’s set in Sandton and it’s about a couple who are emigrating to Australia.”
“Would you ever consider emigrating?” I ask. “Going to a place where playwrights don’t have to depend on the outcome of a rugby match?”
“Never,” he says. “These are the characters I want to write about.”