Adam Haupt On stage in Cape Town
Charles J Fourie’s Jobias takes biblical symbolism into the Karoo landscape, where it has long been at home in Afrikaner minds.
The play deals with the life of a farm worker, Jobias (Andre Roothman), who has been a loyal employer of Oubaas. Jobias, blessed with an abundance of highly fertile farm animals, finds his life in turmoil when someone who passes himself off as his distant cousin arrives.
This arrival is preceded by an exchange between the cousin, Lewis/Louise/Swerwer (Chris Gxalaba), and Oubaas (Johan Malherbe) and, in a near-paternal exchange, we receive the suggestion that Oubaas might be Swerwer’s father. The essence of this exchange centres upon a wager – the loyal Jobias will not turn on his employer of 50 years. The vehicle for this challenge is the land reform laws.
Conveniently, Jobias’s cousin presents himself as the minister of land affairs’s chauffeur. This ”donker-vel” family member therefore ignites the determination of Gerterts (Ivan Abrahams), Baardman (Royston Stoffels) and Skeerder (Andre Samuels) to persuade Jobias to get a slice of the pie.
There is much that is problematic in the play. The scene in the minister’s Mercedes sums it all up. Swerwer tells the three workers that if you want to be successful in these new times, you have to ”toe the line”. A slight upon the ANC government, one supposes. This sort of criticism would be very helpful if one felt that the play actually picks up on the land debate and contributes to it in a meaningful way, but much of the cast’s energy is lost by the play’s shortcomings in this regard.
Jobias loses everything except his wife (Teresa Cloete), the only female character in the play, despite his refusal to join his fellow farmworkers in their endeavours. They conspire in a magic ritual, meant to change his mind, that looks like a bad spoof of the three witches in Macbeth. The scene comes complete with an alcoholic incantation: ”Borrel, borrel, gryp hom by sy gorrel.”
The ironic reference to the tot system is not lost and the scene also carries with it the suggestion that these ”coloured” buffoons, reminiscent of Trinculo and Stefano in The Tempest, are hardly capable of managing their own land and independence. At the end Oubaas seems to set Jobias free and Jobias takes up the cross for the part which the sweet and yet righteous Draadkar (Denver Vraagom) plays in the labourers’ pageant.
What is Fourie suggesting, one wonders? Where is the loyal servant, who finds himself evicted after misfortune befalls him, left at the play’s biblical end? Is he a Caliban, set ”free” by Oubaas/Prospero/God? Why does Oubaas get to do this? Are the political dynamics of the play to be resolved by men exclusively? It is not clear how the issues are resolved and, instead, we are left with biblical inferences which do not make a constructive reading of the play’s concerns possible.
Oubaas is presented as a dignified, wise and enigmatic figure, but his coat and Stetson recall the SABC’s Keep it Country. Swerwer’s pseudo-evil laughter characterises him as a version of Satan, but the problem is that he is using the land reform laws to play ping- pong with farm labourers’ lives. Ultimately, one wonders whether a conservative political agenda is not clouded by very thinly veiled religious gobbledy-gook.
Jobias is on at the Nico Malan in Cape Town until May 23