Shopping and Fucking is one of the most controversial scripts to be staged in South Africa. Charl Blignaut sits in on a rehearsal
The moment I walk in I can feel the energy in the rehearsal room change, becoming slightly flustered. Five faces turn and look up at me from the floor where they are sitting talking in a circle on the well- worn carpet of a large open room on the Market Theatre precinct.
The young South African cast and director of Shopping and Fucking – British writer Mark Ravenhill’s sensational debut play – mumble their greetings. If I had been a stranger lost on his way to the bathroom and walked into this room by accident, I might have thought I had just interrupted some sort of prayer meeting. As in reborn, not seance. Or a group therapy session. “Hi my name is Charl and I’m an alcoholic …” Maybe a group of former teenage junkies trying to keep it together in the Nineties.
Immediately I wish I was invisible; that I could make like the proverbial fly and climb a wall, spying on the group of pretty young actors without intruding while they try and make sense of an improvisation exercise director Yael Farber has just put them through. I walk to the back of the room and scratch around in my bag for a notebook and pen and the actors continue their conversation, the comfortable tones of the confessional filling up the room.
“It was weird,” says one actor, “I kept thinking you were going to drop me, you know, or that you would force me out of the group.”
“Really? No way, you were such a comfortable weight. It felt so right …”
Farber, the twentysomething director, makes her way over to me and we introduce ourselves. Before she has even finished telling me about the silent exercise in physicality and emotion – “holding and letting go” – that she has just completed with her cast, I ask if she will be cutting any scenes from Shopping and Fucking.
“Well, it’s running a bit slowly, so I might need to tighten it a bit. The British speak so much faster than we do.”
“So will you be cutting any of the difficult scenes?”
Farber’s incredulous look speaks volumes. “No way. If I cut anything it’ll be the boring stuff.”
It is with a sense of profound relief that I settle into a beaten up old red leather chair next to the group of actors. It’s a question I’ve been burning to ask since I read the script a few days earlier.
Believe me, there are several scenes in Shopping and Fucking – and two in particular – that many a local director would have cut, toned down or become so hung-up about that they would have stifled the quiet, churning power of Ravenhill’s play before the auditorium lights even went down.
But Farber is, I will discover, not that kind of director and her actors are not those kind of actors. She made the difficult issues in the play clear at the auditions already. “I needed to know if the actors could cope or not. Not everyone is ready for these kind of roles and I respect that absolutely.”
Frankly, I’m not sure that anyone could be ready for these roles – except instinctively, as thoroughly modern, Nineties kind of people who are willing to tackle a modern, Nineties kind of play and discover, in the process, what lurks in the darker part of their generation, poised as it is on the brink of a new millennium.
First performed in London in 1996, Shopping and Fucking has been hailed as something of a modern classic – even by the establishment. “Yes, it’s shocking,” wrote one critic, “Reality is shocking. Ravenhill gazes into the maelstrom without blinking … [He] offers us one of the most savagely beautiful and bleakly funny stories of a dislocated generation we have ever seen.”
The play is “a gritty urban fairytale” involving Lulu, Robbie, Mark, Gary (and Brian, who isn’t present today).
Mark is played by Brian Webber, the multiple award-winning actor who almost missed out on the role due to his schedule on the British film version of that famous queer drama Bent. Mark loves Gary, played by talented young Wits Drama School drop- out Peter Guy. Gary is a 14-year old rentboy who was abused by his stepfather as a child. Mark meets him on the rebound from heroin withdrawal. Which doesn’t particularly please Robbie, who loves Mark. Nick Borraine, star of such trendsetters as Mojo and Popcorn, plays Robbie, in turn loved by Lulu, the only female in Shopping and Fucking.
Lulu and Robbie entered Mark’s life when he spotted them in a supermarket and bought them from their pimp for a nominal fee then took them home with him – long before he went into rehab while they got involved in phone sex and E-dealing to get by.
Lulu is played by Sylvaine Strike. She is, ostensibly, the actor sitting in the circle in front of me with the most to lose: she is known to over 6- million easily amused South Africans every week for her role as Frankie Dwyer in the TV sitcom Surburban Bliss.
Of course, they all have something to lose. There is always the chance that local audiences will focus only on the controversial scenes in Shopping and Fucking and overlook the play’s terrible beauty and astonishingly real sense of being a (relatively) normal, E-popping, nightclubbing, sexually awakening kids in the big city in 1998.
Hell, who knows what a South African audience is going to think of Shopping and Fucking?
But right now Brian, Peter, Nick and Sylvaine are not thinking about the audience. That’s still three weeks and a world away from the therapeutic calm of the rehearsal room. Right now they are trying to make sense of the improvisation exercise they were doing before I walked in. Guided by Farber, they are beginning to understand the perpetual transactions that keep their characters clinging to one another while also letting go in a play that is incredibly complex and yet very basic.
The improvisation exercise was designed by Farber to test the trust between members of the cast as they head into Scene 13.
In Scene 13 there is a male-on-male gang rape. Simulated live. In front of an audience. And that’s relatively okay compared with the realities of the famous “bleeding arsehole” situation of Scene Four – caused by a client with a penchant for knives.
Which is, of course, why I had wanted to know from Farber when I walked in if she was going all the way with this thing or if she was going to tone down the brutal reality of scenes Four and 13.
“No, without the bleeding arsehole there is no play,” she says to me later. “What is a bleeding arsehole? It’s a wound. It’s a scene that’s dealing with something incredibly raw. It’s such a vulnerable situation and I’m trying to find ways of helping the actors understand why this 14- year-old boy, Gary, has these needs.”
Sitting in the red chair taking notes while the actors talk through the next scene I start feeling more and more like a shrink listening to the problems of typical urban teens as they try to make sense of what compels them to look for certain releases.
A whole string of words flows from their conversation: disposable culture, virtual reality, instant gratification, microwave dinners, buying, selling, disinherited generation, plastic, ecstasy, therapy, love, sadism, shoplifting, tricks, trips, traps, myths, monsters, integrity, cruelty, and every single term used in therapy you ever heard.
It’s that kind of play; dark and sick but also somehow morally responsible in its unflinching gaze. It tells it like it is.
But it is only when Farber rounds the actors up and starts a run-through of the end of Scene 12 that the energy of the play kicks in for me. And with it comes a strain of dark comedy, twisting through their every action.
When Farber calls out, “Okay, let’s break for supper,” even I feel relieved – and I’m just sitting watching from the comfort of an old red leather chair.
“I want to get young people back in the theatre,” says Farber to me when we sit down to dinner. The Market is trying to sell the play to the kind of kids who wouldn’t normally go to the theatre. It has worked once or twice before in the past few months, most recently with Ben Elton’s Popcorn at the Civic Theatre. During the run, Borraine, who plays Robbie in Shopping and Fucking and who played the trendy psycho killer in Popcorn, was mobbed by rave bunnies when he went out dancing one night. That can only mean that if the right kind of plays are offered then the kids will start supporting theatre.
The Market is aware that the next generation is not buying tickets and Shopping and Fucking hopes to change that for a few weeks. The play has been endorsed and sponsored by such trendy and burgeoning youth culture products as SL magazine and Diesel clothing.
Still, the obvious question is why Farber chose such a bleak text. “I am attracted to darker work,” she confesses over a Greek salad, “but there’s also something very comical about Shopping and Fucking. In a way it’s a fairytale.” And the sex thing? “I have always been interested in dealing with gay sexuality on stage.” Her The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me was a considerable success, as was her production of Bent.
Our conversation twists from books to movies and back to the rehearsal process, then to her views on the honest fuck-up that is the Nineties – as opposed to the money-grabbing cover-up of the Eighties – before coming to rest on her cast, sitting at a nearby table.
She is incredibly proud of how willing they have been to tackle the issues in the play and she is convinced that if they respond to the text with honesty, the more oblique aspects will gel with an audience.
I am too, but even so, one can’t blame her for feeling a tad nervous. After all, when the Market released its advertising material for Shopping and Fucking, all the mainstream newspapers sent the ad back, finally agreeing to run adverts for Shopping and F***ing. The independent press was forced to settle on Shopping and F**king after the print authorities deemed the word “fucking” unprintable.
Back in the rehearsal room the cast gathers in their circle for a read-through of Scene 13. Farber finds herself teaching them old children’s games she remembers, to activate the almost primitive rituals in the scene – “what we left behind on the playground”. By the time they are ready for a run-through of the play’s decidedly climactic climax we agree that I best not hang around in the red chair much longer. After all, it’s still a couple of weeks before they need cope with an audience and no amount of flapping will turn me into a fly.
Shopping and Fucking previews at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg from May 7 and opens on May 14, running until June 13