These days, the Market Theatre management claims, people book tickets because they want to and not out of some obligation to the place that, once upon a time, changed South African culture.
If you pop into the theatre now you’ll find a video monitor fixed to one of those pillars laden with brass plaques. The monitor, that plays enticing snippets of current productions, is a small indicator that we’re living in the multimedia age, an age in which anything that generates light, works to lure the eye.
Take Robin Orlin’s orpheus … i mean euridice … i mean the natural history of a chorus girl that plays in Paris at the Corbeil-Essonnes theatre later this month. In it she combines dance with practical light and closed- circuit television, and it works a treat. So much so that no fewer than two other performers have claimed, subsequently, that Orlin copied their ideas. (As though the staging of performance with live video is something new.)
Content-wise there is nothing new emerging from theatre these days. But even though we tolerate the same movie plot being told a million times over, theatre has become so elitist that any set-up vaguely resembling another gets accused of plagiarism.
In contemporary art performance – colonised here by university graduates – the race is on to see who can construct the definitive image to describe how technology has alienated us from each other at this late stage of the century. In emerging grassroots theatre, however, the race is on to see who can most aptly sum up the domestic problems of people caught between the traditional and the modern.
Plots dealing with the latter have come up in at least three of the seven plays selected by the Market Theatre for their Barney Simon Young Directors festival, spanning the previous two months.
Steve Mnisi’s Hayi S’bali, Monde Mayephu’s The Red Door Case and Thulani Nyembe’s Bozzoli … Like Pantsula … Like Mshoza don’t say great things about African men. If they’re not slapping their women across the face, they’re pulling guns on their best friends. They’re greedy, ambitious and deceitful. They place undue value on material things like cars and mobile phones.
The plays are melodramatic, alarmist and, most of all, brave. Where once the African man, in the prime of his life, was depicted as a fearless freedom fighter, today he seen as a victim of false desire. And all he can do is take it out on his wife.
Audiences have been thrown. With the new reality coming at them hard and fast they have no remedy but to laugh. It’s a response witnessed in the Market Theatre Laboratory’s Gomorrah! and in Sello Maake ka Ncube’s Kose Kuze Bash – both of which deal with rape. And it was the sorry sight of abuse that caused the biggest hoots.
Beyond the laughter, one factor remains -and it is live theatre that makes this abundantly clear: men, who were previously disenfranchised, have not found security in the new dispensation. Feeling their weaknesses, they have needed to assert themselves over those who depend on them most. It’s a trap, described with discomfort and disgust.
For this, audiences have arrived in good numbers. The Market Theatre, that began the festival without knowing what would emerge, must feel amply satisfied that in one instance, at least, it has struck gold.
This week it announced that Nyembe’s Bozzoli … Like Pantsula … Like Mshoza will be developed for a full run in the Laager Theatre where it played for one week. At the same time it announced that, with the success of the festival, it will be launching the same initiative in 1999.
Bozzoli is a drama about youth culture that highlights the similarities between the pantsulas of the Seventies and the kwaito kids of today. With some of the best township jive seen on stage, it shows the conflicts in gang culture, violence and drugs.
While these plays have depicted hardship and abuse, the theatre can be relieved that it has accomplished its task.
On Friday October 9 and Saturday October 10 the Barney Simon Young Directors festival will round off with the eagerly anticipated Deep in the Coca-lala, directed by Johnny Barbuzano