The new Afrikaans TV thriller Die Vierde Kabinet gives Gys de Villiers another leading role. Janet Smith discovers fame hasn’t necessarily meant fortune
Two old Cessnas, a panel van and a Kombi make up the inventory of Logistic Inc, a company fictionalised into unsuspecting political life by Afrikaans TV thriller maestro Jan Scholtz in his new drama Die Vierde Kabinet. One of the company’s partners, Bush Louw, must collect a filing cabinet stuffed with damning evidence of police corruption from the Unit of Organised Crime.
It is 1993. Three other top-secret cabinets and their inevitably dangerous files have been blown sky high. The fourth cabinet, the ultimate payload for Louw and Logistic Inc, is the critical piece in an intriguing puzzle of dirty tricks.
Scholtz’s material is a millimetre from the bone. He teases at the truth, roughs up the past. Not too close. Not too deep. Just enough to make his thrillers uncomfortable enough to suspend our truth and reconciliation-toned disbelief. Whether you find his manner of telling a tale reactionary or not is scarcely the point.
Besides, Scholtz has got Gys de Villiers playing his lead for the fourth time, and that has got to be good. De Villiers will undoubtedly give Bush Louw – a hero for the average conspiracy theory victim – some class. These particulars are unambiguous: from a critic’s point of view, De Villiers is an actor’s actor and a director’s actor and a scriptwriter’s actor. When he’s on screen it is evident that he prefers to go to that unnerving place where ordinary life is put away and the character is born.
Naturally, this doesn’t mean the script, the director or the other actors in much of the work he has previously done for television have been worth the labour. To be frank, there is so much kak on the air that actors who manage to pull through without having compromised themselves entirely are prized.
So we’re sitting in a breakfast room being served coffee by an enthusiastic waiter with a bald white head and a rather distracting collection of piercings. De Villiers looks tired. He had advised against an interview the day before, pre-empting a holiday hangover. But it’s more than that. The kak reeks into the conversation. What does an actor do when he needs a job that will satisfy prospective landlords but which allows him scant pleasure. Scholtz characters are among the few that are coveted. Beyond Scholtz, Koos Roets, Annie Basson, Ilse van Hemert and Ettienne de Villiers, there are not too many good reasons to work in South African television drama.
De Villiers is not complaining, though. It’s more like he’s suffering from a mild to serious case of ennui. Whatever you want to call it. He is in his late 30s. He’s tired of drivelling idiots foisting drinks on him in bars because they recognise him from television. He looked at his father, legendary film-maker Dirk de Villiers, on a recent trip home to Cape Town and wondered at himself and the life he had chosen. Would he consider taking over the family business? Would he run kaalgat in die daisies for R2-million because there are so few people in South Africa willing to turn over good money to save the soul of our sputtering film industry?
“Not a chance,” he says. “I still find it amazing that you can work incredibly hard, produce work that quite a lot of other people don’t seem to mind looking at, and yet, at the end of the day, you won’t be able to scrape together enough money to make it seem at all worthwhile. I’m not sure most of us want to live like that.”
De Villiers exhales the pervasive depression among artistic South Africans too old for the Y Mama Y bash at Park Station but too young to die. Acting has given him a good life, but now he’s of a mood to build sweat lodges and craft wire puppets. Maybe open a restaurant where decent people can get a plate of good food for R15. Not too many tables. Nothing fancy. Clean.
Perhaps in anticipation, De Villiers took a different route to stave off the feelings of dread. He opened a party joint called Gys se Gat at the Klein Karoo Kunstefees in Oudtshoorn with his friend Preston van Wyk.
“It either means this,” he holds up two fingers in the fuck-you position, “or it means this,” he opens his mouth and points inside. Either way, it’s about talking, using talent to make other people respond to you. He’s yearning for that response – the one actors get from being on stage, the one that feels a whole lot better when the box office takings are wild like they were for Uit die Bloute, the celebrated 1996 drama which drove him and Anna- Mart van der Merwe on a national tour.
“The last time I had such a monstrous connection with work was in the 1980s. It’s not quite the same on television. In some ways I think that on TV actors are just the paint. The plumbing, the foundation, the walls …
everything is already there. We just come along and make it look good.”
Unless, of course, he’s working with actors like Van der Merwe, Michelle Botes (his co- star in the Scholtz thriller Triptiek and its sequel) or Frank Opperman, who plays a mean bastard of a cop in Die Vierde Kabinet. De Villiers says there have been times when he has looked into another actor’s face while a scene was being filmed and realised his job just wasn’t fun any more.
Okay I’ll act, he’s thought to himself, and you do whatever you want to do. With an actor like Opperman, he says he can feel life coming back to the areas that were becoming comfortably numb.
“The fun side of acting, where you feel you’re building a house every night for a different audience, is also diminishing inside the four walls of the theatre. I think we need to move into a more physical kind of theatre, a carnivalesque kind of theatre where we’re performing where people want us to perform. The growth of the festival circuit has definitely helped to nurture artists and audiences.”
But, says De Villiers, he’s rather more concerned with the One Life theory. You only get one, and you’d better make it feel as real as possible. It might not be his destiny to spend his life as an actor. He’s not sure. If he was living in America and had played the lead in four major dramas, he would have been a millionaire, famous beyond his dreams. In South Africa, you get prospective landlords turning down your offer to lease because you’re an actor. Oh, and free drinks from fans in bars.
Big deal.