Chris Dunton LET US PLAY edited by Zakes Mda (Vivlia, R30)
Let Us Play gathers together three plays – one by the editor, Zakes Mda, and one apiece by Walter Chakela and Hilton Swemmer. Three distinctive works for the theatre, by three dramatists associated with Johannesburg’s Windybrow Centre, the first two are especially designed for production by schoolchildren and students – which is not to imply, in any way, that they can’t grip and delight an adult audience as well.
Mda’s Love Letters addresses the value of pre-colonial culture, and explores the relative degrees of power young men and young women have in negotiating a love match. Focusing on the way Zulu beadwork can be used to pass coded messages, the play helps us see that beads are not just beads, that “there is something deeper in them than decoration. Beads speak the language of love.” It’s a tender and poignant play, whose energy comes from its humour, its visual appeal and from a drama of deception and misunderstanding that Mda develops in the second part of the piece.
The main action of Love Letters takes place in the distant past; a contemporary framing device encourages the audience to relearn the language of beads. That kind of cultural reclamation is the business also of Chakela’s Kweku Ananse, the second play in this collection. Here, when an old woman asks a group of children why their mothers don’t tell them traditional tales, one replies: “My mother must have forgotten all about those adventures. All she talks about is The Bold and the Beautiful.”
The old woman then introduces the children to a series of traditional tales, all of which turn on the exploits of the cunning, conniving spider, Ananse. This is a name that crops up often in African tale- telling, African theatre: the Ananse stories, originating in Ghana, are now reworked, reproduced in versions all over the world (in the Caribbean, Britain, North America); perhaps the best-known version is that found in Efua Sutherland’s classic The Marriage of Anansewa.
What we find in Chakela’s version is one culture being embraced and vitalised by another, as he offers a string of five Ananse adventures, adapted for a South African context. There’s a lot that delights in this play, especially its characterisation: the tiger, who takes his responsibilities seriously, to the point of pomposity; a flash monkey, who chants “I am not a moegoe/ I live downtown/ Where the music is playing/ I do the patapata”; above all, Ananse, who may be small but has no rival when it comes to the “brains arena”.
The third play in the collection, Swemmer’s The Extras, is for older students to perform, or adults. It’s a play of considerable verbal vitality, provocative and with a deliberately edgy, jittery quality. The main characters here are extras on a film set: invisible employees, “the landscape for the stars”, whose work is invaluable, whose labour is exploited.
There are comic opportunities here for role-playing as the three are ordered to take shot after shot at a scene for a naff Anglo-Boer war drama. But this is basically a play that explores contrast in character and in individual defining experience, as the three, between takes, reminisce and reveal their aspirations. The play’s basic tension – introduced early on, but tautening later – turns on the fact that one of the three owns to inner demons, to an unmastered obsession with violence.
As well as providing the first of the three plays in the collection, Mda is also the book’s editor. A point he makes strongly in his introduction is that play texts are a means to a goal, and that goal is performance.
This can’t be said often enough, especially when – time after time – live theatre comes close to registration as an endangered species. Moving beyond Mda’s introduction, a vital question is: where are the main energies of South African theatre to lie in the near future? In the huge ambitions of a play like Breyten Breytenbach’s Boklied; in the kind of virtuoso one-actor touring show now being produced by Amanda Lane; in fiercely exploratory multi-media pieces like Ubu and the Truth Commission, or Robyn Orlin’s Orpheus/Euridice/Chorus Girl?
Or will the future lie in maintaining continuity with the past, with the more familiar realist theatre of Athol Fugard, of Paul Slabolepszy, and (very broadly speaking) of the work in Let Us Play? Whichever it is, their success on stage shows cheeringly that these plays are all highly performable, all evidence of work by dramatists determined to help ensure South African theatre’s survival.