Adam HauptOn stage in Cape Town
The nightlife in central Cape Town is vibrant, and a casual observer watching the cars cruising and the dudes boozing might easily think that the multicultural beast that is South Africa is perfectly represented here. But this is a misapprehension. The m ore pretentious forms of cultural expression still tend towards enclaves.
That’s why it’s refreshing to see variegated audiences turning up at Cape Town’s Coffee Lounge to see After the Beep, Mark Lottering’s humorous take on being coloured and being Cape.
Based largely on aspects of his own life in the ”Clora” (coloured) community in Retreat where he grew up, the show is a celebration of life on the Cape Flats during the 1980s. Lottering uses terms like ”Natalie”, ”Wendy” (white) and ”Clora” (which origin ated in gay and lesbian circles) because they defuse tensions surrounding race – particularly when it comes to the sticky issue of ”coloured cultu re”.
After the Beep takes its title from the show’s introduction: We hear a message from Marc’s mom on his answering machine. This message takes us into a sketch of his aunties gossiping about a white-clad bride at a wedding they attended.
Lottering also sketches classical moments which many Capetonians would have forgotten, such as Dimitri Jegels’s programme on Radio Good Hope in the 1980s – 2:30 Date (”and you’d better not be late”).
His father was a Pentecostal minister and he developed his talent as a keyboardist and vocalist in the sobriety of the church. At school he was interested in drama, but succumbed to the glamour of Matlock and LA Law. Needless to say, the desire to study law stemmed from the belief that such careers were the only ones worth pursuing if you were going to please your parents.
During his undergraduate years, Lottering worked as an usher at the Baxter Theatre. It was during these times that he felt he really should have studied drama, but slaved on because he didn’t want to disappoint his parents. He started to attend audition s despite the fact that he had no formal drama training, and soon realised that he was most comfortable on stage.
He participated in Baby (for which he got the Cape Times Theatre Award for best actor in a musical), Jesus Christ Superstar, The Treasure Tree and Ain’t Misbehaving, but soon became weary of the ”it’s-not-what-you-know-but-who-you-know-world” of theatre and was motivated to create a show of his own. (There was also the fact that many of his young black professional friends simply did not go to the theatre because they could not relate to what was on offer.)
After the Beep was meant to have broad appeal while also having fun with racial stereotyping. Lottering planned it as a music show with bits of dialogue, but his pianist chickened out and he was forced to rework the show into stand-up comedy – days befor e its debut.
He braved the brutal honesty of a potentially unamused audience and lived to tell the tale of positive reviews from the Cape Town press. On the question of whether he thinks his show runs the risk of confirming racist attitudes, Lottering responds that h is audiences are intelligent enough to read what he is up to with his caricatures.
After the Beep by Marc Lottering can be seen at Jargonelles in Johannesburg on March 20 and 21 and at the Coffee Lounge in Cape Town on March 27 and 28