success
Allan Glogauer On stage in Cape Town
Deon Oppermann’s One Man’s Life was something of an oddity at the Grahamstown Festival this year. Of its seven performances, six were sold out and the other grabbed a 95% house. It’s been touring for over a year, and Oppermann happily confirms that it’s been similarly successful wherever it’s been.
Eric Nobbs, who plays the protagonist (whose name we never learn), saw Oppermann’s Sweet Sorrows, a piece written for actress Wilna Snyman. He was “deeply impressed” by Oppermann’s insight into the female psyche, and began to nag him to write something equally insightful with the same emotional quality for a man.
The plays are not a mirror image set of “his and hers” one-handers. Sweet Sorrows consists of four monologues, spoken by four different characters. One Man’s Life is, well, one man’s story. Like any piece of good writing, Nobbs says that it’s complex and about many things. Rites of passage, male menopause, and a love story.
Listening to Nobbs speak about the play, it’s clear there’s another love story happening. Having travelled with the piece around the country for over a year now, it’s clear that he has formed “a relationship” with the material. It’s grown from being his baby to his boytjie. Like a proud parent, he continues to be moved by it, and is humbled by the power it has to move his audiences.
There’s yet another love story in the text, in that it loves and celebrates every gewone oke’s experience of manhood, not the single skewed fragment of male experience called Machismo.
Men’s experience of life isn’t limited to thumping their chests and swinging from vine to vine, beer in hand. Oppermann says that the play is “a picture of a life, with all that goes into it – sex, death, life, dreams, suffering, disillusionment, joy”.
That seems like quite a lot of ground to cover in just over an hour. Nobbs likes that the summation of the play suggests it is a journey, and we chat about the truism that good theatre does exactly that – takes its audience on a journey.
Being about an ordinary South African man doesn’t mean the play has to be a stereotypical barroom chat about how different okes are from chicks, and how that difference always leads to misunderstanding and distance between the sexes.
Nobbs is careful to emphasise that, though the play does inevitably celebrate the differences and similarities between men and women, it’s much more an exploration of what it means and how it feels to be a man. It sounds as though the play reclaims and discovers a lot of men’s lost emotional territory.
Although the play is about one man’s life, it’s clearly also about everyman’s life. The piece would travel overseas just fine, says Oppermann, because it’s not merely a South African piece but a “human piece”. Regular men and women lead exceptional lives everywhere.
Though he’s humbled and pleased at the success of the show and people’s reaction to it, he’s not surprised at all the raving he’s received, because he believes so implicitly that the writing is simply among the best contemporary stage material around. Women have stopped him after the show and thanked him for finally shedding light on why their husbands and sons behave the way they do.
One Man’s Life opens at the Nico Arena in Cape Town on Wednesday July 22 and runs till August 8