Stephen Gray
Review of the week
Jana Cilliers’s wonderful solo performance is by now so esteemed that another recommendatory report on it would seem irrelevant. Currently well into her run at the Momentum in Pretoria’s State Theatre (until November 6, when it will be transferring to Johannesburg’s Civic Theatre), she is fast confirming her status as a national treasure.
All the elements are right for her show to keep succeeding. It has sponsorship from the National Arts Council. Ingrid Jonker is her topic – yes, the youthful Afrikaans poet whose devastating protest poem against the pass laws Nelson Mandela chose to recover at the opening of Parliament in 1994. That stage-space is hallowed, with an awesome technological back-up.
Now is also the moment to revive and discuss difficult cultural issues, like the life-sacrifice a poet made in order to be heard, and her sometimes tasteless way of dramatising her message. Outside the parking on the night I attended the show were placard-wavers protesting against Jesus Christ Superstar; one wonders what they would make of that irreverent Ingrid Jonker superpoet.
The nature of Opdrag: Ingrid Jonker should be sorted out. The title means an assignment or mandate to focus on her life and work, but this is no dressed-up recital of well-known items. Rather it is an ingenious, twisting script by Ryk Hattingh, sometimes solumn and anguished, sometimes twittery and even funny with hysteria. It is the confession of a powerful, puzzled Nineties diva who happens to be obsessed with Jonker, that existentialist rebel of a whole generation before.
So the issue is to recuperate and present the admired departed. Who was she really, anyway? And the outcome, after all, is a rather bleak, although affirmative, one: that yes, a presentation of Jonker would just be possible. So much for philosophical fiddle-faddle.
But this means, in stage terms, that the quotations from Jonker, when they get dropped in, do come across as very surprising and fresh. The one about the child killed at Nyanga is horribly shocking. By contrast, the one about little madeliefie daisies in Namaqualand is so pure. The pig’s view of a Christmas banquet is now truly gross. Good use is made of an SABC radio interview with Jonker; here we now see her as clear and firm in her poetic goals, while quite unable to field her interviewer’s philistinism.
On a vast stage, all Cilliers has as her comfort zones are a chair to plonk down on and a frame in which she may pose (and later deliciously swing). She treads in white paint, leaving footprints into the dark in a chilling enactment of Jonker’s suicide, retreating back to nature, disappearing into the sea (aged a mere 32, in 1965). These are simple effects, devised by director Mark Graham, which deliver impressive, memorable results.
At times, the commanding, oh so good- looking Cilliers is merely a face under leonine locks, a wrist with a bangle, a bare toe or two under rumpled pantaloons, caught in the magically fluid lighting like bits of some great Greek statue: smashed, beaten, just an aria of distress .
Still, how to stage such a paradoxical subject? Cilliers has a go at Jonker as feature film, Jonker as opera and very wickedly at Jonker as an item on the African Mirror newsreels, where whoever had the mike, like Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, had the power. There are some cringe-making asides, like the presentation of the list of donations to seed the memorial poetry competition in her name: Nadine Gordimer (and indeed many others): R10; Jack Cope (who would consolidate her reputation for the rest of his days): R14; Andr Brink: R20; Uys Krige (who doted upon her): all of R48.
This team is not that generous, either. They do not quite do Jonker justice by writing off her literary activism as merely politically correct. She liked to give out that she was born poor, yet her father was the MP who designed the apartheid censorship system and she went to Wynberg Girls High, after all. She maintained that she wrote her poems in cafs, on the Clifton bus and between shifts down at the factory, yet won bursaries from no less than Ernest Oppenheimer.
But the point is surely this: before the Sestigers went all show-off, she did like no one else say what needed to be said, that the same human heart beats in the pew and in the pub, in palaces and also in pondoks. Perhaps that was even braver of her than may be recreated today. And tough to repeat.