Charl Blignaut: On stage in Johannesburg
There’s a very cool moment in Ilse van Hemert’s Mallemeulwals when Sandra Prinsloo, playing a glamorous and world-weary leading lady in turn-of-the-century France, gazes lazily into space and proclaims, “Love does not exist.”
It’s a point she gets to prove just moments later as she plunges into bed with a virtual stranger. A flourish of guitar strings and that’s that.
This is the world of Arthur Schnitzler and it’s a world in which lust reigns and love is rudely shoved into the wings. His play about men, women and that thing they do caused such a tizz when it was first performed in 1906 that the poor man found himself in prison.
Now, almost a century later, director Van Hemert has taken Arnold Bloomer’s translation and, along with the cast, worked Mallemeulwals into what can easily be regarded as one of the more notable plays to do Johannesburg this year.
Nobody’s going to get arrested this time round, but they could well find themselves being looked at funny by a local theatre fraternity that seems increasingly intent on offering audiences only the most conventional, bums-on-seats kind of work available.
Mallemeulwals is not a “well-made play”. It does not present us with a nice clean beginning, middle and end. It is instead a cycle of passion in which ten characters meet in ten bedrooms and engage in ten passionate affairs. It ends back where it started, without wagging its finger and without moral consequence.
All of which means that the focus of the work is in a position to shift our attention to the finer aspects of theatre. Lights, tone, mood, direction and two very stunning performances by Prinsloo and Ian Roberts.
The beauty of the work lies in the amazing transitions that take place on stage. Costumes, characters and moods fly as one minute Prinsloo is a toothless whore and the next a giggling little thing tartily dripping ice-cream on her 19-year old breasts.
The level of distinction that years of experience brings to the stage is what stays with one after leaving the theatre. Mallemeulwals marks a return to form for both Prinsloo and Van Hemert and its quiet irony and corny kinkiness are more satisfying that a dozen murder thrillers.
If anything, Mallemeulwals is there to show us that sex has not changed since 1906. The absence of condoms aside, people are people and seduction is seduction.
Mallemeulwals is on at the Civic Theatre in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, until March 14