Charl Blignaut On stage in Johannesburg
`Sometimes to tell a secret, you first have to teach a lesson,” reads a note in the programme for the South African premiere of Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, a mesmerising new production that took to the Market Theatre stage last week. It was the “to teach a lesson” bit that had me worried as I entered the theatre to take in a preview of the most lauded American play of the year. Hell, one could surely be forgiven for carrying with one a couple of misgivings. After all, How I Learned to Drive spans the territory of child abuse and that’s the kind of scene – the issue-driven and therapeutically purging tale of L’il Bit’s recollections of growing up in white trashville in the letcherous clutches of Uncle Peck – that has way too often yielded sensationally simplified and emotionally sanitised accounts of the debilitating effects that yield a crutch for the professional Victim.
Those misgivings pretty much evaporated as the stage lights faded up, the audience instantly invited to take the hand of the protagonist and be transported back to key events that informed her childhood years.
It is a rare experience, but with How I Learned to Drive, one is aware that one is in safe hands from the very first line. Misgivings? Pah! It’s time to gush. How I Learned to Drive is steered by genius instincts and executed within the imperative of a crucial, contemporary socio-political vision.
And, though imbued with the staggering honesty of, say, Dorothy Allison’s groundbreaking account of child abuse in Bastard Out of Carolina, emerging director Barbara Rubin’s production simultaneously manages to encapsulate all the lilting, tacky entertainment value of a John Waters film.
Between the charmed characterisations of her amazing cast – Camilla Waldman (L’il Bit), Robert Whitehead (Peck), Vanessa Cooke, Kurt Wustmann and Anthea Thompson – and the startling structure of Vogel’s tale, Rubin has again announced her presence as one of the most exciting young directors to emerge on the professional stage since Claire Stopford first settled in at the Market. It is now even more apparent that Rubin’s debut, Kindertransport, was no fluke. Here, at last, is a director possessed of that wondrous combination of technical prowess, political conviction and innate storytelling genius.
“Hold a memory when it flickers in a moment of danger,” wrote Allison, “you never know when you’ll need it to light the darkness.” By splintering the chronology of her tale, Vogel has allowed her “secret” to throw up the most unexpectedly gripping series of “lessons”. Her approach has generated a story able to slip through the emotional traffic of victim/perpetrator with gripping narrative progression; yet also able to retain the complex core of her subject. She has, in short, offered us a holistic account of the life of L’il Bit instead of riding out the self-righteousness, selective memories so often attached to tales of abuse.
Of course, an accomplished text is one thing; a convincing production another altogether. A final gush, then, must be reserved for the star of How I Learned to Drive, Camilla Waldman. Just when you thought Waldman had pulled off the finest portrayal of the season in Patrick Marber’s Closer, there she goes and tops it.
How I Learned to Drive is on stage at the Market Theatre in Newtown until October 24