Charl Blignaut On stage in Pretoria
It is really only while I am hurtling along the highway back to Johannesburg from the Pretoria State Theatre that the full effect of Reza de Wet’s latest work, Yelena, begins to sink in.
A leading South African playwright based in Grahamstown, De Wet has chosen to continue her revision of Anton Chekhov’s work by writing a sequel to the turn-of- century Russian modernist’s famous family saga, Uncle Vanya.
It takes a while to appreciate exactly how radical the whole thing actually is, played out as it is within the framework of Cape Town director Marthinus Basson’s impeccably designed, beautifully lit and perfectly modulated production.
With her Drie Susters 2, De Wet maintained a far more obvious South African idiom, the Afrikaans alone localising the play. But Yelena plays off in English, replicating Chekhov’s revolutionary style with astonishing precision. In so doing, she has not only managed to dismiss the politics of local relevance and shift the text into a genuinely universal space, but she has also refined her approach, taking astonishing strides towards a politically liberated SA theatre.
Basson has drawn from the actors – Jana Cilliers, Frantz Dobrowsky, Graham Hopkins, Charlotte Butler and Norman Coombes – a perfectly wooden, old- fashioned Chekhovian delivery and then twisted it with an emotional charge that buzzes and crackles like an electric current throughout the evening.
As the seasons change behind the rustic windows, and as isolation and passion make fools and heroes of Chekhov’s characters, the play quietly shifts into common ground. “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s the day-to-day living that wears you out,” wrote Chekhov.
Moscow, Grahamstown, Pretoria, it makes no difference. What matters is the state of the heart and the conflict of desire. Using, abusing, giving, taking, wanting, rejecting, holding, letting go. Yelena is, on one level, so stiff and formal that it takes a while before you are able to take in the full panoramic view that is being painted – a landscape of the human heart.
Steadily developing her story within traditional confines, it is, again, only much later, as the neon sign of the Ponte flickers on the horizon, that one is able to appreciate how radically she has flattened out the structure of the “well-made play” and offered us a piece that makes its own rules, that has no beginning, middle or end, governed instead by human nature. Just like Chekhov.
Yelena runs at the State Theatre in Pretoria until August 22