Guy Willoughby
THEATRE
It’s a sultry Saturday night in a Mpumalanga small-town bar. A visiting exec, a touch down-at-heel, is chaffing the chick behind the till. His grandiose self- description grows more and more top-heavy; she stares at him as he builds an elaborate, ramshackle castle in the air. Finally, silence. Will she applaud his performance, admire his creation? No. She says: ”If you think you going to get a pomp here, you fucked in the head.” Beat: laughter. Lots of it.
Paul Slabolepszy – who in an ideal world would by now have been declared a national treasure, with a pension and free bus passes awarded in perpetuity – gives us in this, his 26th play (I counted), a riot of verbal wit and chaos that is the true register of the mad, bad country we have now become. If you really want to know who we are, and you have ears to hear, come and listen. But be warned: you may die laughing.
What Slabolepszy has realised – it’s an insight that’s been a-growing in his later plays, most notably in his purest farce to date, Heel against the Head – is that the sheer sound of South Africa, the constant, manic, crackling buzz of invective, blandishment, point-scoring, deal-making, breast-beating and tongue-lashing going on all around us in a bewildering polyglot of tongues, is a hugely efficient and entertaining way of describing us to ourselves.
James Joyce or Tom Stoppard left alone among the deal-makers and metaphor- crunchers of South Africa could not have created a more festive, surreal romp through the crazed linguistic thickets of South Africa. Eleven official languages? Try speaking them all at once. Well, in Crashing the Night, they do. Slabolepszy has composed a kind of carnival of language, where sober meaning is not so much out to lunch as on indefinite, inebriated leave forever.
The fun begins at the beginning, when the comic-linguistic theme is introduced: Graham Hopkins (Bromley) and James Borthwick (De Wet), replaying in a more complex key the Anglo-Boer comic duo of Slabolepszy’s cricketing two-hander Life’s a Pitch, are two businessmen in a shady nightclub, en route to a bosberaad.
Bromley is upwardly mobile, the company’s golden boy; De Wet’s on the slide, on the way out, about to be fired. Yet in the Slab vision of things, De Wet’s our boykie, a good ou in touch with the way things really are: and the discrepancy between them is registered in language. Bromley sprouts ghastly, politically correct gobbledegook, fudging and fibbing; De Wet cuts through the noise with idiom-crunching accuracy to what ”you proactive pricks” are really talking about.
We have been warned at the outset: keep your ears about you, or you’ll get lost. (You’ll get lost anyway, but it’s much more fun if you’re listening hard.)
As the denizens of this odd small-town knockshop-cum-allsorts clearing-house gradually reveal themselves – Clarisa the busty hostess (Camilla Waldman), Daniels the dealer-proprietor (Sello Sebotsane), Visser the maybe/could be anything (Paul Slab) – the verbal fireworks proliferate, the piling up of linguistic explosions becomes a veritable Guy Fawkes of hilarity.
Some may argue that we’ve encountered much of this before in the Slab’s tragi- comedies, and they’d be right. Yes, we’ve seen ’em all, but great playwrights from Ben Jonson to Alan Ayckbourn also keep circling the same themes. What is important is that Slabolepszy treats his familiar characters with deepening compassion, and depicts their struggles, gloriously, within a localised linguistic context that is brilliant in its sheer affrontery.
I want to see Slabolepszy jettison his hankering need for the tragic moment – we search around for this in the second half – and let the comic potential of his stage world fly. Just as Oscar Wilde at last realised he could release his comic genius into its own, matchless setting, and gave us an extraordinary farce of pure verbal wit, so the Slab would be well advised, next time, to let laughter leaven the entire play. Pure comedy is more profound than contrived tragedy.
Paul Slabolepszy’s Crashing the Night is playing in the Main Theatre in the Baxtre Theatre Centre until April 29