Adam Haupt On stage in Cape Town
There is something very ironic about the fact that, in Summer Holiday, our very own obnoxiously heterosexual Boere boy, Steve Hofmeyer, plays a lead role made famous by Cliff Richard, one of Britain’s last remaining ambiguous bachelor boys.
A career moment which seems to have set the tone for Hofmeyer’s sex-thimble future was his part in Agter Elke Man, where he played bad boy Bruce Beyers. There is the priceless scene where a typically abject meisie pleads with Beyers that she smaaks him. The Hofmeyer character responds: ”Ja. Ek weet, almal smaak my.”
With this sort of charisma and the Afrikaner sex symbol hoohah that surrounds him, one wonders whether Hofmeyer would be able to fill Richard’s closet, er, shoes. They just don’t make closets like they used to. And this is exactly what this sort of show is about: nostalgia. There has been much of it doing the rounds in Cape Town: Sixtysomething, Seventysomething as well as the Elton John and Queen tributes. Which brings us to another irony. Some say movies and television are killing theatre. Now In- Concert Theatre brings South Africa the nostalgic theatre version of an old hit movie. The idea was developed back in the Mother Country by Mark Haddigan, Michael Gyngel and Anita Land (whose father represented Richard and the Shadows back in the wonderfully fun and innocent Sixties).
The stage design features realist elements such as the familiar red double-decker, a bubble car and a scooter (complete with the wind-blown hair). Much fun is to be had with the theatrical equivalent of movie travel montages: during every scene-change a mini spotlight follows a little bus as it moves through France, Italy and Greece, which are denoted by icons on a silk screen.
While the South African production is based upon the original UK direction and design, there is still much which would appeal to a specifically South African audience, however perversely. During the Italian SAS’s swoop upon the unsuspecting young ones, a member of the audience declares: ”Downtown Jo’burg!”
Hofmeyer’s presence is obviously meant to be a drawcard for the adoring tannies and meisies of Bloemfontein and Pretoria, where the show will also be performed. On this note, it is hard to miss the easel in the foyer displaying Steve Hofmeyer posters, albums, T-shirts and (wait for it) his poetry anthology.
We also have in the cast Tobie Cronje (Wallace), who is absolutely everyone’s darling. HIs comic professionalism makes this part his own as the audience breaks into side-splitting laughter at his interaction with Denise Stock’s heavily caricatured Stella. But this interaction also reminds us how dated the values in Summer Holiday have become. Regardless of how funny Cronje is, Wallace’s sometimes misogynist one-liners just do not fit the ”innocent fun” bill any longer.
Then there are the attempts at working-class English accents. Should our actors do accents to the best of their ability or should we be doing English and American productions at all? What does yet another imported play do for the performing arts in South Africa, where actors get axed to save money? We have yet to have Andrew Lloyd Webber saying, ”I think I’ll do Sophiatown this coming season and I’ll hire John Kani for elocution lessons.”
Summer Holiday is on stage at the Nico Theatre Centre in Cape Town until March