Review of the week
Charl Blignaut
`I hate theatre,” said my most cynical friend’s boyfriend as he gazed around the Market Theatre bar, taking in the crowd of monied folk out risking their cars to see Pieter-Dirk Uys downtown on a Saturday night at 6.30pm.
“Why do you hate theatre?” I asked. My cynical friend answered for him: “‘Cos you go in for two hours and you come out with three minutes of worthwhile shit. For two hours?”
“The play we’re seeing is just over an hour,” I said.
“One-and-a-half minutes,” he replied.
He was right.
And that’s despite a programme note informing us that William Burroughs said that it was Joseph Moncure March’s The Wild Party – a scandalously modern society poem of 1926 – that made him want to become a writer in the first place. Burroughs never saw the play.
He probably saw one of 750 samizdat copies of the poem circulated in 1928 after it was banned. It resurfaced in self-censored form in 1968. Then, 30 years later, a travelling British theatre company, The Mousepeople, brought their stage adaptation of The Wild Party to Johannesburg. They’re at the tail end of an international tour and are in Johannesburg en route to the 1999 Grahamstown Festival.
The Wild Party is part of a changing Grahamstown festival – one that is finally attracting more diverse international options. But of course we shouldn’t be fooled. Not all that glitters with Edinburgh gold-award nominations and gushing reviews from Time Out is necessarily going to lure Johannesburg – particularly younger Johannesburg – out into the night. Not even Saturday night.
Grahamstown, with a ready audience, should serve The Wild Party better. There, amid the booking frenzy and holiday excitement, it probably won’t be as apparent that the production is slick but lame. Frankly, in Johannesburg on a Saturday night, the party pooped. It’s lovely to look at, but appallingly cramped in the Market’s strange and wonderful little Laager Theatre. It’s precisely executed with an amazing text – in couplets – but beneath the facade it feels like the spirit’s missing. Not the spirit of the times – that’s all there, perfectly posed, techniquey twirls past Jean Harlow, Buster Keaton, Mae West, Rudolph Valentino …
But the flickering light projection that takes you to a glittering piss-up in Hollywood’s Golden Era proceeds to just leave you there. In the course of the piece you will see two actors in a tight space single-handedly portraying swathes of boozing, snorting, fondling, raping, pillaging and precipitous posturing. The heroine, Queenie, will rage against the social and sexual tyrannies of her mogul man, Burrs. He will flirt. She will flirt. Someone will die.
What you won’t get is the spirit of shock and candour in the text. The ominous sexiness got pushed aside to make way for a broader audience, and with it the chance to tour fabulous remote places. The play is like watching two straight-A students elucidate a text. It becomes an exercise – but one that “must be seen to be believed” if you follow Time Out London.
That’s in London. In its Johannesburg incarnation The Wild Party feels strained. It’s too close for comfort and too comfortable for the kids. But who am I and what does one cynical friend really know? No doubt the almost alarming wave of critical ululation that has greeted the play in Johannesburg will sweep it to pre- festival sell-out in Grahamstown. Which is good, because then they’ll make loads of money and come back next year.
Next year, The Mousepeople will be hoping to tour with a reworking of Kafka which sounds far more interesting. In 1996 they staged Dead Meat, “set in a sub-terranian slaughterhouse” with a cast of 22. Leaving the Market precinct, I ask my most cynical friend what he thought of the play. He shuddered in the winter chill and repeated a joke told in the play: “This man goes into a bar. Boom! It was a metal bar.”