Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg
`So, how was the play?” asks a friend over dinner. How was the play? How do you describe Closer? A couple of hours after seeing Sello Maake ka Ncube’s production of Patrick Marber’s acclaimed contemporary British play, the whole thing is really only just beginning to sink in and shake one up.
How was the play?
The play was like watching four astonishing actors tie ropes around their waists and swim out into the ocean as far as their stamina will allow, and then watching them being dragged back in against the tide.
That’s how the play was – an incredible, compulsively watchable, emotional journey; a series of brutally real encounters between four people in love in the city; about gender confusion on the Internet chat lines; about lap dancing and dermatology; about true love and soul mates; about how we define our lives through other people and the memorials that we build to them; about the searing honesty and incessant lies that punctuate lust and the war of the sexes.
Closer is an astonishing modern text about the state of our collective heart in the big city in 1998. It tells a deceptively simple tale of passion, but charts a course of emotion so uninhibited and so charged with the random equations of fate as to verge on the spiritual.
Sounds lofty and difficult; it isn’t. It’s all because Alice got knocked down by a car and Dan decided to help her to the hospital.
If you are looking for proof that South African theatre has finally begun to recover from the inevitable side-effects of the cultural boycott and the equity ban, then you can find it running nightly in The Laager at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg – and, for that matter, upstairs in the Barney Simon Theatre, where Shopping and Fucking is still packing them in the aisles.
Two contemporary British plays that burn with universal relevance. Closer is, in fact, so contemporary that it is still running at the Royal National Theatre in London.
I, for one, cannot recall a time when two such extraordinary works were running concurrently at any theatre in the country.
But the staging of Closer at the Market means a lot more than a welcome re-introduction to fresh international works, it also marks a significant new phase for the original South African struggle theatre – it is helping create a space in which traditional political content can give way to broader issues affecting humanity.
Director Sell Maake ka Ncube, a man with a curriculum vitae so African that his choice of a wholly Western text comes as a mild shock, sums it all up in his programme notes: “We are more alike than what we are not alike.”
Ka Ncube has pulled off a truly memorable, beautifully considered, impeccably paced and deeply moving production. And he has pulled it off with a crisp, clean sense of the modern – a video screen above the stage tuning us into the information era; yet with a keen sense of the old- fashioned – a set that is steadily piled up and pushed against the walls of the theatre until it becomes as cluttered as the human heart.
Most importantly, however, Closer could only have packed the punch it does if the actors were able to handle the text. This they do masterfully, particularly Camilla Waldman and Amanda Lane, both of whom deserve a handful of awards and two dozen red roses each night.
You can see Closer at the Market Theatre until August 8