Once again American actors are starring in a film adaption of a South African play, but Danny Glover used his fame to further the anti-apartheid cause – and he’s a bankable star, writes John Matshikiza
Art is about the suspension of belief -or, in a latter-day sophistication of this theme, the suspension of disbelief.
You look at a painting and persuade yourself that you can see three dimensions of depth, whereas there are only two. You watch a film or a play, and for two or three hours you believe you are transported to a real place in a real time, where real people’s lives are played out, sparking some resonance in your own. You hear a sequence of abstract musical notes and are somehow moved to tears.
Sometimes the lines become blurred.
On a slope on the side of Table Mountain, where District Six used to stand, a French film company has built a fake shanty town. It is not supposed to be taken seriously, not to the naked eye, anyway. It is supposed to await the flood of artificial light, the trick of the camera lens, the electrifying presence of actors, so that it can become the backdrop to one of many sequences that go to make up a story to be cut together on film, and then shown for profit to an international audience. It is all part of the process of suspension of disbelief.
Last week, disbelief came face to face with hard reality on that mountain slope. The French producer and his African-American counterpart found themselves standing in the winter sunshine, trying to persuade a group of bergies who were trying to move into the ready-made squatter village that this was all just make-believe.
It could have been a metaphor for the questions raised around Danny Glover’s latest project: the film version of Athol Fugard’s stage play Boesman and Lena, for which the fake shanty town had been built.
Glover loves Fugard – or his works, at least. There is a debt of gratitude here – almost a knot of blood between the writer and the actor. It is like that with many of Fugard’s other collaborators: Zakes Mokae, John Kani, the late Yvonne Bryceland. It is as if, through the situations and dialogue he has created, Fugard has locked them into a version of their own lives that is almost more real than the reality they know.
“I feel that the characters Fugard writes actually reside in me,” says Glover. “I feel he writes for me – and that’s a hard quality to find in this profession.” He goes on to say that his appreciation of Fugard’s work “is based on resonances in my own culture, and race is the primary issue here: the connecting force in the relationship between Athol and me”.
The works of Fugard, more than any other playwright, have marked the key points in Glover’s career. In the late 1960s, in his native San Francisco, he took the leap from local government employee to full-time actor when he was involved in a workshop production of The Blood Knot with Zakes Mokae.
In New York in 1980, he was involved in an off-Broadway production of the same play. Fugard happened to be in town, and dropped in to watch rehearsals for a couple of hours. With the memory of Glover’s huge presence etched in his mind, Fugard cast him in his Broadway production of Master Harold … and the Boys two years later.
“Master Harold moulded my career,” says Glover. It was his breakthrough on to Broadway. From there came the film parts, and ultimately his arrival into the big time with Lethal Weapon.
In spite of his success in American roles, and in spite of his freedom to seemingly pick and choose the kind of parts he plays, Glover has repeatedly found himself playing South African characters. He played Nelson Mandela in the HBO television drama Mandela in 1987, and was the lead actor in the screen adaptation of Percy Mtwa’s Bopha in 1992. He is in South Africa playing “Boesman” in the second screen adaptation of the famous Fugard play.
Why this revival at this time in South Africa’s history? Why Glover in this leading role as a man who is the archetypal South African bergie, an alcoholic drifter from the edges of South Africa’s confused racial cosmos?
The easy answer is that Glover liked the part. There is the background with Fugard, the respect for what he calls Fugard’s “ability to uplift the spirit” with his tales of people from the bottom of the social pile somehow transcending their terrible existence.
But there is more to it than that. Glover, co-star Angela Basset and the producers, Pierre Rissient from Path Image in Paris, Wren T Brown from the United States, and South Africans Jeremy Nathan and John Stodel, insist on the universality of this story of Fugardian outcasts. It’s not a story stuck exclusively in a South African reality, they say.
“It’s about two people who have been dispossessed of their material possessions, and dispossessed of their souls, who find love in spite of their terrible circumstances. South Africa is just a backdrop for this story,” says Stodel.
But since they have chosen to shoot this film in the country where the original play was set, how South African are the performances going to be? The protagonists become quite defensive. “There’s a danger in getting lost in worrying about accents in any work,” says Glover. “The point for me is that Fugard is a great user of language, the metaphor of language. That’s what makes him universal.” He cites King Lear as an example of a play that is not about Englishness, but about universal human themes. Why should Fugard necessarily be delivered in South African accents?
Basset adds that, in any case, they are not running away from the South Africanness in Fugard’s language: “We’re not using `standard American’, we’re using the language that’s there.” She gives examples: when there is an Afrikaans word, they simply add an internal translation – “hond: dog”; “vastrap: dance”. The translated word definitely sounds American, rather than “neutral”.
But the players, and the producers, are convinced that this will not be distracting. It would be more distracting, argues Rissient, if the audience (and he is talking about the main audience, the great American target market) were faced with an impenetrable accent from the African continent, necessitating English subtitling of ostensibly English dialogue. This is not a good commercial option.
Here is the rub. In spite of all the disclaimers about universality being the bottom line, the real bottom line is commercial viability. That, it would seem, is the reason for the choice of bankable American stars in the leading roles.
This is a dilemma with a long history. How do South African actors feel about being continually overlooked for important roles like these? How do South African audiences feel about having their reality continuously filtered through a foreign lens, the nuances lost in the interests of universal acceptance?
Two versions of Cry the Beloved Country, 40 years apart, put American or English actors in the driving seat. So did Cry Freedom, A World Apart, Zulu and a host of others. Now Boesman and Lena. There is a suspicion that Anant Singh’s Long Walk to Freedom will go the same way. It’s an ongoing colonial sort of feeling, and it is hard to see the chains really being broken until the South African experience is articulated in a South African voice.
And yet it is hard to use that kind of rhetoric in the present situation. A major reason for that is the presence of Glover at the heart of the project. Glover’s commitment to the cause of freedom, in South Africa and everywhere else in the world, makes it impossible to see him in a colonising position. More than most superstars, black or white, he has used his fame to articulate the anti-apartheid cause as much as he articulates the cause of African-Americans.
He attacks his South African roles with the same commitment as the roles that have enabled him to address the black experience in America – notably The Colour Purple, To Sleep With Anger, and the recent adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Glover is no fool. He sees the contradictions. He is aware of what he calls “the Americanisation of the world through cinema”, and the ironic possibility of his being part of it. He has to shrug off this perception as just another of the hazards of being a recognised actor.
In the end, “Boesman” is just another role, whose challenges he finds appropriate to his development as an artist. If his involvement in the film helps him to do a little bit more to make the world a better place, all the better.
The web of fate and coincidence that brought the Boesman and Lena project together is remarkable. It started with an association between Fugard and John Berry, the film’s director, in the early 1960s. Berry was a maverick film and theatre director who had been forced out of the US by the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s – an unrepentant radical and ex-communist. Drifting in and out of directing jobs in Europe, he was brought in to stage the English production of The Blood Knot, Fugard’s breakthrough on to the international arena.
The two men developed a mutual admiration that was sustained for the next 30 years.
Late in 1998, Glover attended a rare showing of a film called Tamango at the San Francisco Film Festival. It was a film about American slavery that had been made in 1958. Glover was still smarting from the disappointment of Steven Spielberg’s treatment of the slave trauma in his film Amistad. The earlier film, also made by a white director, struck him with far greater passion and depth. He sought out the director: it was Berry, and his film was being shown as a tribute to his long and illustrious career. Berry was now 80 years old.
The two men started talking. Berry mentioned a screenplay he had been trying to get funding for for a number of years. The screenplay was an adaptation of Boesman and Lena, which he had directed in an award- winning stage version in New York way back in 1970. Would Glover be interested in being connected with the film? Glover expressed possible interest, but didn’t think much more about it.
Then, in March this year, Glover had a stopover of a few hours at Paris’ Roissy airport. He was surprised to find Berry and two French producers, Rissient and Francois Ivernel, waiting for him. They took him to the nearby Hyatt hotel, and talked to him about the film for the next hour. By the time his onward flight to Washington was due to leave, Glover had agreed to come on board.
The French producers say they originally wanted to use South African actors in the film. The chemistry between Berry and Glover changed all of that. In the end, it was two major American stars, Glover and Basset, who were signed to portray the central characters.
That was good for the deal being put together to make the film a viable project. But it had other ironic consequences. The main money was coming from European Community sources, and their conditions stipulated that films funded from those sources should employ predominantly European nationals, both as actors and crew. Negotiations allowing the two Americans to be used meant that the almost silent figure of “Outa”, the dying Xhosa man who comes into Boesman and Lena’s lives, had to be cast “European”.
The role went to Willie Jonah – Sierra Leone- born, but resident in London for more than 30 years, and a British citizen. No South African was to make an appearance on the screen. That’s the way it pans out in the movies. It’s not supposed to be real life anyway – it only pretends to be so. It’s an illusion.
Will the film work? The question will not be answered until we are able to see the finished product on the screen, some time in the year 2000. For now, the producers are delighted with the results they are seeing. The actors are passionate about the redemptive depths they are releasing through their work.
Everything rests, ultimately, on the interpretation achieved by Berry and his actors. A good play can survive many different interpretations. Where I see only bleakness in the ending of Boesman and Lena, with the brutalised woman dutifully following her man off into an unchanged world, Basset sees Lena’s final moment as one of victorious transformation.
Elizabeth Taylor, through the biting power of her performance in the 1960s film of The Taming of the Shrew, turned the character of Kate into a triumphant figure, rather than the tamed and submissive wife that Shakespeare appeared to have written.
If this film achieves the same kind of reversal, and if Basset’s performance approaches the transcendence of her Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It, we might well see a Boesman and Lena that will surprise us all.