/ 17 September 1999

Creating magic out of the banal

John Matshikiza

WITH THE LID OFF

Aphasia is a neurological condition which affects your ability to connect ordinary objects and activities to the words that describe them. The most famous description of aphasia is contained in the title of the book by Dr Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. And it can get as bad as that.

The condition does not translate into literal behaviour – for example, the man in question probably did not try to cram his puzzled spouse on to the top of his head as he went out the front door. He had simply lost the use of a whole section of his brain where descriptions for things like “wife” and “hat” had been stored since early childhood, and, staring vacantly across at his ever-loving at breakfast one morning, the word that came to his lips as he looked at her was “hat”. And “hat”, it gradually dawned on her, was what she was destined to stay until the end of time, because aphasia is often an incurable condition.

Scary, isn’t it? By losing access to descriptive language, half your world disappears through a hole that unexpectedly opens up at your feet. And it’s probably even worse for your loved ones and acquaintances, as a complex personality goes missing for ever, while still remaining part of their lives.

There is potential for extraordinary drama here, and Peter Brook seized on this potential for the creation of another in a long line of plays developed at his International Centre of Theatre Research in Paris. The piece was called The Man Who, and it had a short run at the Market Theatre last week.

Was it extraordinary drama? Well, except for an amazing tour de force of physical and verbal disconnection in a monologue delivered by Bruce Myers late in the play, it was for the most part heart-wrenchingly low-key. But that is the essence that Brook was careful to work for with his company of actors, most of whom have been living and working together for most of the past 30 years. Watching the performance was like having a privileged window on two worlds at once: the acted intimacy of a doctor and his patient, and the intimate precision of a tight band of actors who have literally passed from youth to middle age together, and work like a single, quiet piece of magnificent machinery.

The masterstroke was in creating theatrical magic out of the plodding tragedy of the banal. This is, ironically, where Brook also lost a large part of his South African audience. The stage was bare save for a few functional and very ordinary pieces of furniture. The lighting was mostly undramatic, and the actors were basically dressed in unassuming white and black, the kind of stuff you’d pick up at a flea market, or at OK Bazaars.

I suspect that many in the huge crowds who rocked up to pay homage to the master were expecting to see the colourful and choreographed splendours of the Mahabarata, or a kind of theatre that echoed the legendary Seventies Midsummer Night’s Dream, adorned with a circus paraphernalia of stilts, tightropes and acrobatics. What they got was the painful image of broken souls, reflected in the minute changes of expression in the actors’ eyes. If you missed that, you missed the point.

At a pre-show talk session on the last Friday of the show’s run (bizarrely billed as “a public conversation between masters Peter Brook and John Kani on the practice of the theatre”), playwright Deon Opperman stuck his neck out and asked the million- dollar question that had been troubling hundreds of his countrymen and women who had been to see the show: would the rigorously researched material that went to make up the play not have been better used in the making of a television documentary?

You could have heard a pin drop as all eyes in the auditorium swung from the intrepid questioner back to the gnome-like figure of the guru Brook, sitting on the stage.

Brook gazed down into the auditorium, holding a perfectly constructed dramatic pause before replying. When he did speak, it was with a little sigh.

“It’s very sad to hear you say that,” he said softly. The piece, he explained, was not a lecture about a certain neurological condition. “Theatre covers everything in human life. As elsewhere in the eternal world of comedy and tragedy, these are complete human stories. At any time, this condition could claim any one of us – it could be you, it could be me.”

Everything about life becomes more and more absurd and terrifying, he said. The more we find out, the less we know, especially when we venture into the secret territory of the human brain. But from another angle, he said, the whole thing is also laughable. That is the essence of the human condition.

So there was the answer. The kids who burst into laughter at what stiffer members of the audience regarded as inappropriate moments in the drama were actually on the right track. So were the people who wept silently for the poignancy of victims who were themselves blissfully unaware of their own tragedy. Life is like that -neither black nor white, but a mixture of tones ranging from gloom to laughter to hysteria.

So perhaps there was another kind of aphasia at work here – the disjuncture between the minimalist theatrical language that Brook has arrived at, and our limited ability to read it.

WITH OUR COLLECTIVE BRAIN LONG DISCONNECTED FROM THE MAINFRAME OF HUMAN THOUGHT, WHAT DO WE EXPECT?