Guy Willoughby
‘Herman Charles Bosman died in 1951. Why revisit him now? Simple; we need to look to the past, the pre-apartheid past, to know the way forward. Apartheid so pervaded our consciousness that it’s immediately dated itself. All the writing of that period is exactly that – period stuff now …”
David Butler, one-man star of a sharp, funny, poignant tour of Bosman’s writings called A Touch of Madness, muses meditatively in the midst of his Cape Town run at the edge-cutting Gauloises Warehouse Theatre. Butler has toured the show across the country.
“I’m reviving a tradition very much alive in Bosman’s day, the 1930s and 1940s – the theatre touring circuit of the old National Theatre, later the Performing Arts Councils. Out-of-town audiences are hungry for a cultural life: why should we deprive them because they live there? With the steady drift today from city to country, you find in Plett and White River as sophisticated a crowd as anywhere.”
For this versatile actor, local means a great deal more than lekker; it’s how he defines himself as a creative force. Butler lists as career highlights his work in gestating indigenous plays: “Robin Levetan’s Skyf; Anthony Akerman’s Old Boys; working with the Take-Away Shakespeare Company; my play, co-written with Nicky Rebelo, What Annette Said In Her Sleep Last Night …”
How did the Bosman project come about? “Fifteen years ago, A Cask of Jerepigo opened my eyes to Bosman’s city writings, to a wider perspective to his work than the rural setting of his well-known Groot Marico stories.
“I began to lay hands on everything I could find by him and on him, with the idea of one day presenting this other material. Patrick Mynhardt had of course successfully done the Marico, so I would engage the other, the urban Bosman. Things simmered.
“I started kicking ideas around with [actor-writer] Nicky Rebelo. Many bottles of wine later, we threw caution to the winds and booked a slot at the National Arts Festival at Grahamstown last year – without a script!”
A Touch of Madness, the script Rebelo compiled out of what Butler calls “lots of enthusiasm and trunkloads of artistic doubt”, caught festinos’ imagination. Since then, Butler’s gritty, heartfelt engagement with Bosman’s writerly persona in its many guises has struck a chord all over. What has this maverick writer to say to us now?
“He was saying things in the 1930s that we’ve only lately got to ourselves. We must look to Africa for inspiration, wherever we came from. He was a great Africanist before the term was invented.
“‘Africa’, he said, ‘is the genius among continents.’ In his writings about Johannesburg he encapsulates the soul of the city, as reflecting the soul of Africa. Take those lines about the mine dumps – ‘they’re as aesthetic an expression of Africa as the pyramids’. That opens up whole rafts of fresh thought.”
To me, the reception of A Touch of Madness, and the rereading of Bosman it entails, is part of a tendency now to revisit our pre-apartheid past. Butler agrees: “Under apartheid artists relied on political dynamics to drive their work. Now we actually have to define ourselves, to ask, what might have been had apartheid never happened?
“Bosman’s preference for pure poetry, living for and through art in the Romantic tradition, speaks to us now.” A chuckle: “Actually, Bosman always said art is first, politics second. He loved the meetings, though – meetings were much more fun than the politicians.”
Another cheroot, another thought: “God forbid that apartheid should ever come back into fashion, though. It just might. I mean, look what happened with platform heels!”
A Touch of Madness is on at the Gauloises Warehouse Theatre, in Cape Town, until May 20. Tel: (021) 418-8338