Chris Roper: On stage in Cape Town
It’s a little weird that none of the press releases for Old Wicked Songs mention that one of its defining concerns is Jewish identity. It’s almost as if the PR is mimicking the actions of Stephen Hoffman, the young piano virtuoso played by Paul du Toit, when he attempts to deny his own Jewishness in the face of some crudely caricatured Germanic prejudice.
There are other strong issues driving the dramatic engine of the play. Stephen is a young American who was a fted prodigy, but now finds that he lacks the emotional empathy to become a truly great pianist. He is sent to Professor Josef Mashkan (Saul Reichlin), a lovable and irascible old Viennese drunk, to be taught how to feel.
There is also the inevitable and hackneyed collision between the brash New World and the stylised Old World, and the usual irrelevant agonising over what real art is. It turns out to be one part sorrow, one part joy, place in proximity to frustrated sexual desire and watch it grow.
It’s all very male, very romantic. The only female characters are the grand piano (seduce it, don’t rape it, says the wise old Prof), and a faceless Israeli woman who is driven to copulate with Stephen by the horror of visiting Dachau – presumably on the principle that the more horror you experience, the quicker you become anaesthetised to it.
The nuances of the play are totally overdetermined by the maleness of its premise, which is that of artistic primogeniture. Mashkan teaches Stephen to get in touch with his emotions, to appreciate the difference between true art and soulless mimicry, and basically to become the sort of untenured academic old fart that the Prof himself is.
All utterly predictable, and you begin to realise why they chose to play down the Jewish thread. It’s the only thing that might conceivably challenge the type of well-made South African audience that fills the Theatre on the Bay.
The play is set at the time of ex-Nazi Kurt Waldheim’s successful election campaign, and there’s an eerie resonance with local conditions. The idea of a Jewish underclass that becomes complicit in its own oppression becomes severely problematised in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. When Mashkan tells Stephen the story of his concentration camp experiences, music swells and obscures the words. This is fitting in an Adornan kind of way, but suggestive in its reminder of the elision contained in the press releases.
The indulgent misogyny of Schumann’s Dichterliebe song cycle, and Mashkan’s use of the songs to initiate Stephen into the ways of fleshly art, is the matrix that informs the progression of the play. This at least keeps you waiting interestedly to see which bit writer Jon Marans will knit together next.
Reichlin and Du Toit are astonishingly good – Du Toit even manages to carry off the overwritten and potentially stilted scene about the rush of desire that follows great sorrow. The direction by Geoffrey Hyland is taut and accomplished, but as a narrative whole Old Wicked Songs lacks contemporary relevance, and doesn’t say anything fresh about art and emotion.
Old Wicked Songs is on at the Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town until March 15, moving to the Alhambra Theatre in Johannesburg from March 19