Review of : the week
Nicholas Dawes
Southern Born is Myer Taub’s first play, and it has the considerable advantages of a strong cast and an experienced director in Mark Graham. Given the parlous condition of serious theatre in the Western Cape, one approaches it with every hope that the script will be strong enough to extend the actors’ talents. As it turns out, all concerned are extended, but not for the right reasons.
The Blackmans are a Johannesburg Jewish family of declining fortunes, and the play is set in their back garden. It is Friday evening, and Nathan has returned home from his travels unannounced. This catalyses a whole brew of troubles.
Judith (Stacey Sacks in a very nicely judged performance) is to marry into an overbearingly religious family, an event she obsesses about endlessly. Ashley (Langley Kirkwood) is acting violently to get attention, and Nathan has been spending up a storm on his father’s severely strained credit card. Meanwhile, offstage, Comfort, the domestic worker, coughs incessantly. She has TB.
Michele Maxwell’s Ruth is very much the Jewish mother of post-Portnoy’s Complaint clich. She laments her son’s thinness, despairs at his lack of interest in suitable women and relishes physical descriptions (the suppurating testicles of a pet dog, the flatulence of relatives, her own sagging breasts).
As you might expect, she says things like: ”What must I do to make you laugh? Must I slit my throat?”
Peter Krummeck does his best with Leon, the emotionally unavailable father. The script drops some rather clunky clues to the reserves of feeling that he keeps sequestered behind his put- upon facade, but he is never allowed to develop this dynamic into something more complex. Leon may have a Yiddish accent and say ”genug is genug”, but Mordecai Richler this is not.
All of these reservations notwithstanding, Act I could probably stand on its own as an intermittently amusing and sympathetic sketch on homecoming. Nathan finally manages to come out, the Sabbath meal of non-Kosher pizza gets cold, and deeper difficulties are hinted at.
Unfortunately the scenario is too shop-worn and the characters too neatly lifted from the stock archive to sustain interest beyond the first hour. This becomes increasingly clear as the second act struggles toward conclusion.
Kirkwood’s arrival as Ashley promises to inject a little vigour into the proceedings, and he certainly makes a valiant effort. He is far and away the most appealing member of the family, despite being saddled with an extended Cheech and Chong routine. It seems, however, as if the only way he can generate some dramatic force from the script is to play it very loud and very large.
The strategy works up to a point, but the light it produces serves primarily to show up just how crudely drawn the role is.
When Ruth takes an ecstasy tablet by accident (an eventuality so unlikely that Taub has it happen offstage) the narrative gears begin to grind in protest and it becomes clear that the script has gone seriously awry. Perhaps the most tiresome consequence is that both cast and audience now have a drastically amped-up version of Ruth to contend with.
It is may be fortunate then, that Comfort, who has taken no fewer than 11 of the pills, is kept in the wings. In the first act her coughing seems a necessary counterpoint, a reminder of the place – at once central and marginal -that black servants occupy in white homes. In the second she serves as a punchline for Ruth’s ramblings and as an access point to Ashley’s character.
He, it seems, has knocked up her daughter. Comfort has now become a device for explicating her employers. Like a proper maid, she must remain in her room while the family works things out.
When, after nearly two-and-a-half hours, the final confrontation between Leon and Ashley arrives, it offers a neat enough twist on the standard coming-out formula. By this stage, however, those audience members still awake are too bored to care.
Realist theatre of this kind must be skilfully worked to succeed, and one suspects Taub will get better at it. Until that happens the best Southern Born can hope for is a firmly handled scalpel.
Southern Born is on at the Nico Arena in Cape Town until April 3