Guy Willoughby speaks to Marthinus Basson about his latest collaboration with poet/playwright Breyten Breytenbach
Marthinus Basson – design-directorial supremo, arts propagandist, all-round theatre maestro – is snatching coffee and koek between final rehearsals of The Life and Times of Johnny Cockroach, his latest explosive collaboration with poet-turned- playwright Breyten Breytenbach. Restlessly pacing the noisy Nico Theatre canteen, Basson is barefoot, distracted, and brooding – as always – on the relations of artist to state: “People ask me, `Why don’t you go to Belgium? What’s the point of making theatre for people who don’t appreciate it, where you struggle to find sponsors, and there’s no support structure?'”
Most brilliant, if maverick, of refugees from the palmy days of state-subsidised theatre, Marthinus ruefully embraces the only honest answer: “For me, it only makes sense to make work here. How would I be an artist in Belgium? It’s fantastic working there on occasion, but it’s like icing sugar – like pudding. We have no choice: the artist loves to be in opposition.”
Art and society, society and art: the endless tension between these two is Basson’s favourite topic, actually his hobbyhorse, and he rides it with passion and style.
“Opposition – that’s the ultimate purpose of any artist. That’s where Breyten comes in.” A wicked grin from beneath beetling brows: “You can’t always lick the public arse. Sometimes you’ve got to put a finger up it – which may cause disturbance as well as pleasure.”
Johnny Cockroach, second collaboration of these Afrikaner cultural titans, Breytenbach and Basson, is an extraordinary work – one- fourth rant, three-fourths vision, it is sermon, lecture, tract, philosophic dialogue and ineffable poetry rolled into one. Basson’s job is to steer the torrent of words into theatre, and with a breathtaking instinct for stagecraft, he succeeds (“It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do”).
Basson wins outstanding performances from a slightly bemused cast: highlights include Dawid Minnaar’s haunting, elegiac “Boer” – spokesman for a romanticised Afrikaner past – and Sibongile Mngoma’s honey-flavoured singing voice as an impish Buddhist goddess. Not so much a stage play as a sheer feast of sound and images, Johnny Cockroach is an imaginative riot, a breeding-ground of ideas. Whose ideas? An entire century’s worth of ideologies, a ragbag of discarded slogans and catchphrases, TS Eliot’s “heap of broken images”: “Breyten debates freedom, history, the artist’s role, race, violence – but there’s absolutely no answer, no instant solutions.
“You have to struggle with the questions yourself. People were upset by that at Grahamstown, sitting there on those hard benches, but they say now, `We hated it, butll it’sl never left us, we’re still asking questions, we’re still struggling with it.’ Now, that I love.”
Johnny Cockroach first saw stagelight at last year’s Standard Bank Arts Festival: “The Bank were incredible, they gave us generous financial support where others thought we were `too ambitious’ in what we wanted to do.” For Basson, the poet is shaping up as playwright – and he as director is getting better at interpreting the vision all the time: “Breyten’s writing is like no one else’s. The success of the play comes partly from the fact that the writer isn’t entirely a dramatist. He comes with a very fresh angle. He’s writing more for actors now: the rhythms have improved greatly. To me, it’s like mining: Poof! Here’s a diamond. Poof! Here’s an emerald … It has that kind of richness.”
Boklied was written in Afrikaans, Johnny Cockroach in English. Does the shift in tongues shift meaning too? Basson denies that Minnaar’s “Boer” character privileges a romanced notion of Afrikaner history in the play. “Breyten is a crafter of words in both languages. For me, there is no difference in whether Breyten uses English or Afrikaans.”
Where is the poet-dramatist at this moment? He was on hand when Basson and cast wrestled with the text before their Grahamstown debut in July. Basson grins: “He’s in Mexico. He tells me he’s holding the hand of St Agnes.” St Agnes, patron saint of would-be brides, had her feast day on January 21. “More than that, I cannot tell you.”
Marthinus Basson and Breyten Breytenbach first met in 1997, when the poet approached the director with his first essay at dramatic writing – Boklied. “I was totally intimidated when I got this phone message that he wanted to meet me. When I was young, Breyten was God!”
That gargantuan word-and-visual feast debuted at Oudtshoorn’s Klein Karoo National Festival in 1998, horrifying and enchanting the same Afrikaner cultural establishment which in apartheid years had spurned the “albino terrorist” who served time in prison during the 1970s for his active opposition to the apartheid state.
The combination of Breytenbach’s searing vision and Basson’s inimitable stagecraft – seething, orgiastic, visually compelling – was electric.
Comparing that production with the new play, Basson muses: “Boklied was an upheaval, disturbing perceptions. Here, the danger is that the play becomes didactic. As director, do you concentrate on the debate or the poetry? The play needs extra silences, time to reflect. This is very tough on the actors, it demands tremendous concentration from them.”
How has the Basson/Breytenbach collaboration developed this time round? “Breyten has learnt a tremendous amount. This play went through five versions, make no mistake. We’re constantly talking to each other, constantly consulting. He’s fantastic in that respect.”
Basson observes that “this play is far more political. Boklied was much more about the artist: for me, it comes from Breyten’s experience of being an exile inside the country, in prison, and subsequently outside. It’s about the meaning of art being tied to a time and place, and about what makes the artist immortal.”
By contrast, Johnny Cockroach is about Breytenbach the political animal, the post- apartheid writer who – like all of us – is trying to revise ideologies at the end-of- century. The great theme of Johnny Cockroach is freedom, debated across time and place by a bewildering variety of speakers, for the elucidation of a cockroach-witness who has watched eons of human squalor and travail.
For Basson, the ambiguity of Breytenbach’s text reflects his own disillusionment with the powers that be, as well as with the 20th century as a disastrous phase in human history: “He believes artists have been short-circuited; they are not central to the thinking at the top in this country.”
The Basson/Breytenbach collaboration represents a teasing cultural moment – the coming together of an artist reared within the previous state-subsidised paradigm, and one who has moved from ostracism to mainstream acceptance and cult status. Somehow, these two have arrived at the same place from different places, and the result is memorable, upsetting, magical theatre. As Basson observes: “He was in jail while we were playing.”
Who, then, is Johnny Cockroach? “Breyten reverses Kafka’s fable, in which the man becomes an insect. Here, two cockroaches, the truly immortal creatures, ask God to let them become human so they can die, so they stop watching humans century after century. It’s quite an oblique, quiet, hidden little metaphor. Who is Johnny Cockroach? He’s a litmus paper for mankind.”
Johnny Cockroach is on at the Nico Theatre until January 29