Charl BlignautOn stage in Johannesburg
There is a bizarre moment in the Johannesburg Market Theatre/Stockholm Stadtsteater co-production of August Strindberg’s 1901 tragi-comedy Dance of Death when the subtle, classic lighting design suddenly spins out of orbit and transforms the stage into a discotheque, John Kani’s cantankerous Captain thrusting his arm in the air like a cosmic John Travolta, his pelvis twitching with a life of its own.
It is at this precise point in the play that 1998 collides head on with 1901; that the play’s farcical comedy fuses with its terrible tragedy; and that the Captain’s tired flesh meets its spirit. It is this kind of carefully considered and sparsely employed symbolic gesture that underscores what it is that makes Swedish director Carl Kjellgren’s approach to Strindberg, Sweden’s grand old man of expressionism, the kind of experience that no theatre-lover should miss.
Strindberg’s tale of what happens when a bickering husband and wife living in isolation on a military outpost are forced to let the outside world in – and in so doing take stock of their lives – has never seemed so fresh. Kjellgren has taken as his starting point a desire to test the comic undertones in a play that is usually regarded as a tragedy and it is this factor that has allowed a host of other themes and ideas running through the play to be liberated.
Of course, he has been aided most admirably by an astonishing design by fellow-Swede Ilkka Isaksson and by three spot-on performances from Kani as the husband, Jana Cilliers as Alice, his wife, and Arthur Molepo as Kurt, a relative posted to the island who pops by to visit one evening, catalysing a chain of memories and long-seated resentments that will come to a head as the lights switch to death disco mode.
The actors play their roles as if walking a tightrope between the play’s divergent elements, at once stylised yet real enough to have every married couple in the audience chuckling in identification, at once sad yet also hopeful, at once a period portrayal yet also modern. Kani, in particular gives a performances of a lifetime.
All in all, these various elements add up to a perfectly subtle and highly accomplished focus on text and staging – priorities that seem to have become unfortunately rare in a local theatre scene dominated either by mindless entertainment or by a socio-political agenda.
From the moment that the lights go down you know that you are in good hands. It is, after all, not every day that there is a director in town who is able to showcase exactly why a classic is a classic – that it remains relevant and entertaining even 100 years on.