Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg
It is difficult to pin down exactly what it is that makes director Yael Farber’s production of Britpop theatre brat Mark Ravenhill’s 1996 debut, Shopping and Fucking, so powerful.
Difficult because the production is consistently awesome. Difficult because, after seven years of being a theatre critic, I have all but forgotten how to gush; ages since I didn’t want a play to end. Ages, for that matter, since I have been able to identify with, let alone be transported by, any one of the thousands of characters I have watched trundle across the Johannesburg stage.
There’s a reason that young people are not buying theatre tickets and it’s not because they’re scared their car will be stolen from the parking lot. It’s because you may as well go and watch a movie or pop an E and go dancing. Our theatre has a stodgy stigma; it has been overtaken by cinema and by technology and it has failed, with few exceptions, to capture the high risk reality of being young in the Nineties.
Somehow Farber’s production gets beyond all that. Perhaps the secret lies in the packaging; in the way she has handled the transitions between scenes – those moments when the stage plunges into darkness, a good old-fashioned hard house track comes thumping through the auditorium and the lazer beam flips out, shaping words against the back wall.
When the stage lights come up again, the transition was so smooth it feels like the auditorium has been suspended and the scenes edited together. What Farber has achieved – aided by an inspired club-lighting design, an evocative Alice in Wonderland set and her actors’ keen instincts-is a production that feels like a film yet is able to offer theatre’s unique catharsis.
Which is not to say that you can just lay down some house tunes and smart lights and get away with it. If the production was just trendy no one would be convinced. Shopping and Fucking may feel like a nightclub, but its a nightclub when the police raid and the lights go up, the real world storming in. It’s too dirty and too difficult to be trendy. The characters – played with guts, skill and flair all round, and even more so by Brian Webber – are a bit of a mess, living out the fantasies and realities of a generation caught between the commodification of the Eighties and the uncertainty of the new millenium, between a rock and the edge of the world.
Ultimately Shopping and Fucking is speaking about how we have inherited a legacy of infinite transactions. Our daily existence is determined by what we buy, what we sell, and what value we attach to those things. What we use and what we abuse. And what we give for free.
Shopping and Fucking is on at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg until June 13