Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg
If what it takes for a talented young black co-writer and director to get his latest play mounted on the main stage at the Market Theatre is a Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Drama, an acclaimed United States tour and an artistic directorship at the North West arts council, then thank heavens for Aubrey Sekhabi.
Right the way through Not With My Gun I found myself wondering what the impact and literary value of the play might have been if it was relegated, as usual, to the nominal-budget limited-seat venues that new black texts seem to illicit.
Would the ever-divine Baby Cele’s entrance in a poofter pink nightgown have commanded as powerful a sense of occasion as it does on the vast and revamped main stage? Would the dynamics of new money and the black middle class have been as poignant without the luxury of a spacious set?
More significantly, would the – predominently black – audience have felt that same sense of collective pride in the ability of a popular new playwright to work loose a decent budget investment and then make like Slabolepszy or Fugard and test the limelight with a real depiction of everyday lives?
It’s a test that Sekhabi – despite an agonising half hour or so of drawn-out plotting somewhere in the middle – has passed with distinction.
Not With My Gun is, in every sense, a product of new developments on the local stage. Emerging from what he refers to as our theatre’s “laboratory phase” and its focus on the workshop, Sekhabi is beginning to find his formula.
It is his ability to draw an audience in and allow them to identify with his characters – in this instance four life-long friends celebrating on the evening before one of their weddings – that is breeding his particular strain of pop.
Sure, Not With My Gun is commercial, but it’s mainstream with a message. Once Sekhabi has finally got our undivided attention he then moves swiftly in for the kill, pulling no punches as his characters are forced to confront a white burglar and test their desire for revenge.
By the end the audience is left reeling, taking from the theatre a lingering question: even if a black life is indeed still less valuable than a white life, does that mean that black South Africans must stoop to the levels of the “former” white mentality?
That Aubrey Sekhabi can disguise an overarching and un-naff moral polemic within a fairly predictable plot’s inevitable clichs and then twist the pop formula to compel his audience is one of the most exciting developments on the local stage in many moons. That he has offered six black actors the chance to settle into some meatier roles is a bonus.
Hell, at the very least Not With My Gun has proven that emerging black theatre can draw an audience. If black patrons are not frequenting theatres in South Africa then why were there 500 seats filled last Saturday at 6pm. After all, how do you know if you don’t try?
Not With My Gun is on at The Market
Theatre, Newtown, until September 5. Tel: (011) 832-1641.