Guy Willoughby
REVIEW OFTHEWEEK
Andr Stander: policeman, bankrobber, escape artist, master of disguise, mere mortal, potent myth. The man who 20 years ago kept South Africans enthralled with his larger-than-life criminal exploits was all of these – and thus a more than fitting subject for maverick playwright Charles Fourie, whose one-man, multimedia exploration Stander opened tumultuously last week.
Captain Andre Stander, South African Police, remains a fascinating and truly South African paradox. By the time he died in a hail of bullets in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, early in 1984 – or did he? Is he alive and well, and living in Buenos Aires, Bedfordview or Beaufort West? – the famous/nortorious, loved/hated bankbuster had woven a trail of legend that lingers today.
Born and brought up a textbook, small- town Transvaal boereseun in the sunny apartheid heydays of the 1950s, blonde, blue-eyed Andr seemed set for a textbook life as a model, but minor, apartheid functionary. His father was a redoubtable police general, his upbringing a blend of old-time religion with lashings of rugby, and he was clearly destined to follow in Pa’s footsteps.
Laden with honours from police college, married to the girl next door, he began an steady ascent up the career-cop ladder that soon placed him in authority – in charge of the charge office, Kempton Park, in fact. He was young, handsome, an officer boasting both a mortgage and a droopy moustache. What more could he possibly want?
Actually, Captain Stander did want more – a whole lot more than his puny police salary could procure. Somewhere during that textbook trajectory into adulthood, Stander had picked up ambitions that didn’t fit the script he’d been given. At first under the cover of convention – he used to rob banks, out of town, in disguise, in his off hours – Stander did a most dangerous thing: he began to write his own script.
The results were awesome, entertaining, every bit as authentic as the similar thief’s existentialism of – say – Jean Genet, and played out on a far huger stage than the French dramatist ever managed. If Genet lived out his edgy philosophy, Stander positively revelled in his – and all before a vast admiring audience, the gape-mouthed South African public, just turned on to TV and as yet lacking a thumping local soapie.
In a very real sense Stander – the daring, devil-may-care dief who bust out of jail and never got caught – became our first television star, hero of his very own skop-skiet-en-donner show. While the police bumbled and burbled, and yet another daring heist hit the news (was SABC TV news ever so sexy, before or since?), South Africans rooted for Stander, claimed to have seen him everywhere, prayed they’d be in the next bank he bust.
It couldn’t go on, of course; even the best cliffhangers at last go over the edge. So did Stander – but not before giving the cops, and the viewers, a good run for their money.
As the net closed around his accomplices Patrick McCall and Allan Heyl, Stander slipped out of the country to the United States. There, after a strange series of artless blunders, he was blown away in a rain-soaked driveway by a certain Officer Tomaselli. General Stander’s family could bury their offending member, and the rest of us could start breeding myths. Who remembers that livid graffiti on a bridge in Yeoville, “STANDER LIVES”?
Enter Charles J Fourie (what does the J he’s now added stand for?), determined to give Stander yet another script – and it’s a good one, too. In essence, Fourie’s scenario goes like this: there are so many Andr Standers, so many masks pretending to be faces, that any attempt at a meta- narrative is doomed to failure. Rather, let the slew of Standers have full play, jostle up and argue with each other, entertain us with their colour, cheek or bombast, and let’s see where (if anywhere) we end up.
In short, Stander is theatre as surface, not psychology, spectacle not depth. Cleverly post-modern where it really matters, Fourie enables the mythic Stander(s) to speak, as incoherently as they like. If at last we come away none the wiser, that’s because wisdom is at best today a highly provisional quality – an effect rather than a certainty.
This is not to say we don’t run through a set of arguments – there are lots of them – but rather to stress that none of the views heard is endorsed by the author. The play’s a kind of tease, a series of sketches in which each character is the same character, and Fourie – bending his ear to each mask/face’s special pleading – carries it off brilliantly.
In this cunning yet ambitious task, Fourie has enlisted a most formidable ally: Albert Maritz, manic face-puller extraordinaire. I have not seen Maritz on stage before – where have I been, I sometimes wonder? – but in this show his performance, or performances, dazzle(s). To say that the actor is mercurial or many-sided on stage is to do him a limp injustice. He dazzles. No other word will do.
Bounding around between all the Andrs – the stage is laden with wigs, glasses, moustaches – Maritz is a big, bouncing petrel of energy, never missing as beat as he swings from one sketch to another.
Perfectly in synch with various video clips of himself/selves, he offers his subject, Stander the man/myth, under various headings: Stander the cop, Stander the video junkie, Stander once dead (at his funeral), Stander as Heyl, Heyl as Stander, McCall as them both … or neither?
At play’s end – not a nice, well-made play’s denouement, in a way the show just stops – we are left exhausted, elated by the wealth of postures one man can muster, and deliciously unclear as to whether the Stander represented on stage was there at all. (The text’s a little long – Fourie does trowel on the death story, or legend, with a too heavy hand.)
Yet Fourie’s monologues – in racily streetwise Afrikaans – are wonderfully dense, idiomatic and layered, even if his Stander’s a set of surfaces. He gives us rich, concretised detail that replays olden-day South Africa, thus adroitly folding into the chic 1970s fashion thang, as well as giving us notes towards a social history of the times.
Stander is a joyous celebration of some peculiarly local strengths and weaknesses, Sam Shepard revisited in Springs, and hot theatre. So don’t be lazy – go and see it. Who knows: you might just end up by writing your own script yourself.
Stander is showing at the Gauloises Warehouse Theatre in Cape Town until June 10. For bookings Tel: (021) 918 8590