Greig Coetzee’s plays have shown alternative sides of the male psyche. Denise rack Louw probed him about his characters
`For me, writing is a passion. At times it can also be a pain in the ass; but, like eating and sleeping it’s something I simply have to do,” says Greig Coetzee, author and executor of The Blue Period of Milton van der Spuy, currently on at the Agfa Theatre on the Square.
Coetzee did his new play at this year’s National Arts Festival shortly after taking his docudrama, White Men with Weapons, to no less than five international cities. Based on his experiences as an army conscript, White Men has played in Belgium, Holland, America, Australia and Singapore.
Even with the play’s measure of success, that included 17 awards, and even after giving up a five-year teaching career, Coetzee was “still financially in dire straits right up until June last year”.
“However, I was lucky enough to get an audition for the Lincoln Center Festival in New York,” he tells me, “they accepted the play. And that had a domino effect.”
Australians, who saw him perform at last year’s National Arts Festival, heard that it was going to New York; so they booked it too. As a result, the show also moved on to the Singapore National Arts Festival.
In Australia White Men played at Perth’s relatively new Black Swan Theatre, “which concentrates on bringing in foreign work, as well as presenting new Australian drama”. Audiences tended to be a blend of South Africans and “native Aussies”, and there was “a distinct overlap in their sense of humour”, although the Australians were “a lot more vocal”.
Playing abroad really brought home to Coetzee that “the military experience is a universal one”. An American veteran told him that, with a change of accent, the play could have been about Vietnam. Singapore knew conscription for a couple of years, too, says Coetzee; so the play was well received there.
Given the phenomenal success of White Men with Weapons, one wonders whether this unassuming artist has felt any apprehension about its being a hard act to follow?
He nods emphatically: “You’re only as good as your last production.” But people who have seen both shows seem to be divided as to whether they prefer the one or the other.
“Personally,” the playwright confides, “I think White Men is a more effective piece of theatre, but Milton is a better piece of writing.”
The Blue Period of Milton van der Spuy is about an “emotionally and intellectually limited” young man who strives to come to terms with a family drama by constructing the tale into alternative versions, making it more acceptable to himself – making it more, “arty”.
You see, before her marriage, Milton van der Spuy’s mother had been “studying to be a bachelor” (a Bachelor of Arts, that is). When children and domesticity put paid to her ambitions, she instilled her love of the arts into her first-born – Milton Leonardo van der Spuy -so named because, “she didn’t know in which direction his talents would lie”.
Her husband’s brutal assessment that Milton’s talents might lie “nowhere” is closer to the truth. Milton, however, tries to live out his maternally instilled fantasies, forever poised to begin the first painting in his Blue Period.
“I originally built Milton’s monologue around the lyrics for a song I’d written as a student – at a time when I was a singer in a very bad garage band,” Greig laughs. The lyrics were also bad; but deliberately so, for comic effect.
Coetzee recalls the process by which the play evolved: “I thought to myself, `Okay, this guy Milton thinks he’s an artist; but he falls a bit short of it.’ The situation lent itself to a few laughs. But then I started worrying that Milton van der Spuy might be stand-up comedy masquerading as drama.”
At that point, director Garth Anderson – “more like a dramaturge really” – was introduced into the equation. “We started playing around with the idea of celebrating the nobility of art, and the struggle of art, while at the same time poking fun at the pretentiousness in art.”
Indeed the “unnecessary bluster” that often surrounds the arts is contrary to this playwright’s philosophy that, “in theatre we need to be simple, truthful and entertaining”.
National Arts Festival audiences clearly loved the blend of humour and pathos that came as a result of Coetzee’s process, that also uses an imagination-tickling array of props.
As for the future, Coetzee is busy writing a two-hander, getting to grips with dialogue and “having discussions with Di Wilson about staging it next year”.
He grins as he tells me that a reviewer recently pointed out that his work to date has been too exclusively in the monologue genre, that the time has come for him to introduce more characters on to his stage. “The point,” Greig says, “has been taken.”The problem has been that, until now, I couldn’t afford to pay a cast – so I had to write monologues!”
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