Charl Blignaut : On stage in Johannesburg
Considering the dismal state of our major urban arts councils – the Pact board is to be re-transformed, while in Cape Town and Durban cutbacks have left administrators with virtually no artists to administer – it is nothing short of a coup that the North West Arts Council is beginning to bear fruit.
Artistic Director of North West Arts Aubrey Sekhabi returned from a US tour of his musical On My Birthday just in time to collect the 1998 Standard Bank Young Artist Award. ”Our theatre is emerging from a laboratory phase,” said Sekhabi in a recent interview.
If this laboratory is indeed producing a new generation of South African theatre, then Lara Foot-Newton, has, with her North West hit Ma Gents, emerged with a trademark proponent of the new school.
Currently on at the Market Theatre, Ma Gents finds itself in good company. Whatever the problems with the production, it is one of a string of development workshops that have begun to yield unexpected fruits.
Ma Gents ends back at the beginning, having come full cycle, from the present (Simunye, Madiba and the Spice Girls) via the past – when crime, it seems, was more glamorous (hell, they don’t make criminals like they used to) and back to the future. It’s a structure able to absorb the emergence of different generations of ma gents; the iconic image of the South African male – black and white, young and old, from Bafana Bafana to boerewors and brannewyn – as he follows in the two-tone shoed footsteps of his role models.
That Ma Gents manages to swing through the eras, styles and cultures with such ease and with such an acute sense of audience identification is no mean feat. It’s strength is a genius style of delivery.
Rolling through lines and characters with a snap of their fingers and a stomp of their feet, the cast develop a synchronicity that hums like a live wire, by the end having established a whole new language.
They can be grateful that this style makes it impossible for the play to fall apart when the plot grows murky, generalisations and themes meandering along, before finding itself again.
Typical of the ”laboratory”, a workshopped plot often lacks focus, concentrating instead on style, on language and on addressing social issues in a way that gets beyond the political simplicity of the protest era.
But the pro’s of Ma Gents far outweigh the cons. Foot-Newton’s dynamic direction and the inspired acting elevate the work way beyond the staid conventions it grew from.
— Ma Gents is on at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg until April 25