Stephen Gray
Review of the week
Well yes, it was a great pleasure on a day trip from Johannesburg last week to become a feverish festino at the second ever Aardklop National Arts Festival in leafy, springy, villagey Potchefstroom. To be part of not just one, but three, full houses for new shows ordinary people wanted to pay to elbow into.
To breathe in the halitus of braaiing boerewors from the fair in Cachet Park and under the oaks of Tom Street. To attend displays of horse-shoeing and coffee- roasting. Still to have killjoy clergy kneeling before Johan Conradie’s superbly sensual nude canvases, revealing it as God’s will that they be removed from public access in the Potchefstroom Museum. It felt like an old-time family gathering, dour Potchefstroom really lightening up some.
The first show this reviewer queued for, stripping a sosatie and slukking a Just Juice, was in your local lower school hall and happened to be the world premiere of the new Antjie Krog work, surely destined to become a classic in the repertoire. It is called Waarom is die Wat Vr Toi-Toyi Altyd So Vet? (which is a riddle better left untranslated), and the message is, “We are who we are because we are all together.”
The situation is this: two mothers of school-going children are colouring in a rainbow-nation backdrop for the forthcoming concert. One is a white former bourgeoise (the extraordinarily strong Tess van Staden – in Afrikaans), the other is the black newly aspirant (a devastating Nomsa Xaba, who gives as good as she gets – all in English). They paint up a storm, they fall out and deface it, at last they reconcile to wipe out some of the damage.
While Krog’s scalding, scathing way with both languages, wonderfully cut and thrust about by the director Marthinus Basson, had its audience, well, aghast with painful and irreverent laughter, the next one – Deon Opperman’s Magspel – felt verbally mingy. This had opened in Grahamstown, and now was linked up to close.
About banking and bonking in feudal Florence, Magspel (say, Power Play) does gaan aan a bit, like those Springbok Radio serials of old, always cliffhanging something terrible about one never knew quite what. No real fury to turn the melo into drama.
>From that the redoubtable Sandra Prinsloo crossed a few blocks for her second very great performance of the day in the dazzling Generaal Mannetjies Mentz (from the recent novel by the late Chris Coetzee). In its souvenir programme Prinsloo’s legendary partner, Marius Weyers, ruefully observes that it is the first time in 12 years that he has appeared in a production with a cast of more than three. The big offering, then: Ilse van Hemert organising a spectacle with all of 20 players. Eleven hundred people in one packed auditorium held spellbound.
Churlish to say that, evidently being the only one there who had not yet read the book, I could not always fill in the gaps in the adaptation. I noted the baneful influence of TV with its short, driven visuals, and never a decent scene which real actors could hunker into and just act out all the way. Which is where the Krog play scores so resoundingly, theatrically well.
But yes, Generaal Mannetjies Mentz does make an important change from the retreat ceremonies at battlefields approach to commemorating that horrid Anglo-Boer War, upon us again. Here the human cost was asserted, with great physical beauty, even with awe.
So that was just one day at the new Aardklop festival.
No chance by then to book into a B&B and stay over. And I didn’t even make the jazz. Or the fringe .