Guy Willoughby
Comedy, drama, car chases, derring-do … at this crazed end-of- decade/century/millennium/world party season, the Cape has it all, although mostly offstage. Other managements are desperate to compete with our town’s longest-running entertainment – the South African police’s extraordinary efforts to help, or hinder, the seasonal killjoy bombers.
Here’s a shortlist of the goodies you can see if the beach and the bombers don’t divert you.
The over-played Seventies is tremendously cutting-edge in Cape Town right now, and not just at all the clubs playing tie-dyed transified 1970s music. We’re celebrating the millennium with the hit shows of yesteryear, such as the Baxter’s production of Equus (first production: 1973), Peter Shaffer’s fraught, philosophical drama about horse sense (and horse sex).
Sean Taylor is strong and compelling as tortured psychologist-narrator Martin Dysart; newcomer Christopher Duncan plays the oft-naked boy horse-worshipper Alan Strang with touching ardour; the horses, all shimmering flanks and flashing hooves, are wonderfully choreographed and portrayed. Is it set in the 1970s or the 1990s? Are we in England or South Africa? Director Roy Sargeant doesn’t seem sure, unsettling a powerful, if period, statement about raw instinct versus tame convention.
Over at the Nico, it’s the turn of fellow 1970s blockbuster Evita, directed (for the third time) by David Matheson. Chief interest in this production is its lead performer: versatile singer-actor Anthea Thompson crowns a remarkable year with a captivating performance as Evita, layering her portrayal with poise, charm, shrewdness and an indefinable glamour that is just right. A pint-sized dynamo, Thompson transcends – actually, leaps over – the part, dominating all her scenes, especially the kind of crowd-pleasing public tableaux in which the historic Evita specialised. Vocally, I was moved by her strength and range, the sense that she has whole vistas still to travel in the part.
Local is definitely lekkerkry innie Kaap this season, with many jolly excursions into the indigenous comic genius. It’s a welcome change from the endless genuflection of mainstream managements to overseas, out-of-date shows. Bursting out of the Cape Flats are a wealth of new home- grown talents, notably Mark Lottering (The Fourth Wise Man, Nico On the Side), Nazli George (Off the Cuff, Baxter Studio) and Oscar Petersen and David Isaacs (Meet Joe Barber, Gauloises Warehouse).
Off the Cuff is, I fear, a good description of this uneven clutchbag of sentiment, cross-dressing and Kaapse clich, held together only by the force of Nazli George’s personality and the liveliness of her performers. While Lottering is of the new breed of one-man rapid-fire stand-ups, Petersen and Isaacs are honing a wonderful two-man comic routine that takes audiences on a manic, bizarre, hilarious tour of the working- class Cape. Meet Joe Barber is a tribute to Isaacs’s neighbourhood haircutter, and with infectious wit he and Petersen create and discard the salon’s characters at a bewildering rate.
The barriers between audience and actors tumble down as one hapless patron is pinned to a barber’s chair, about to be shaved, while another sweeps hair off the floor … happily. It’s a wonderfully audacious comic triumph, a true celebration of the drolleries of ordinary life, and you must not miss it.
It’s refreshing to note that some hot student work has been seen in town too. You’ve just missed More (UCT Little Theatre), “a new play about clubbing, boy sex and goldfish” (written, directed and designed by second-year student Matthew Wild), which managed to be edgy, touching and arrestingly here-and-now. Given some melodramatic moments and an inability (like most local plays) to end at the right time, More tells an affecting 1990s love story, reflects on the dire commodification of sex – and gives the most convincing aural and visual rendition of a bad acid trip I’ve seen on stage.
These enterprising girls and boys know all about the need for sponsorship: their chief benefactor for this production was a male massage agency. Good for them for going out and getting it – and for sending out a bold message about the future health of our theatre industry, long after Equus and Evita are history.