Guy Willoughby THEATRE
Glass Roots, fresh from a debut at the National Arts Festival, confirms that writer Fiona Coyne is a fresh stage voice to be reckoned with. A comedy of manners set in a society with few to speak of (manners, that is), the play charts the tragicomic birth- pains of a world in transition – to no one knows exactly what. At play’s end, we cheerily applaud a fondly shared illusion – that we all try and believe we’re one big happy nation – being revealed as a vast, idiotic joke. The moment of that applause is itself a moment of devastating irony, and the wondrous kind of thing only possible in the theatre. Coyne’s vehicle for her social analysis is cunning: she lays bare the one trade that has fattened up and flourished on the myth of the Rainbow Nation – the advertising industry. A beer called Mobatse Lager is looking for ”the typical new South African” as the face/voice for its nationwide campaign; an ardent, indeed desperate young copywriter, Jocelyn (Jenny Stead) and her energetic business- cum-personal partner, Vuyo (James Ngcobo) set out to find her/him. Their search, and its odd consequences, forms the pith of the play. The result of Jocelyn’s quest proves not only that the quest is futile, but that the Rainbow Nation lies – like the proverbial pot of gold – farther off than ever. The playing is uniformly excellent: director Roy Sargeant has coaxed fine comic performances from everyone, including Gail Reagon as the almost-nearly average South African, the hard-working ”coloured, I mean so-called coloured” wife and mother, Verity. But it is Diane Wilson’s evening. Wilson overwhelms rather than fills the splendid role of Mona, Josie’s ”mother from hell”, who pitches up unexpectedly (don’t they always?) at her daughter’s designer-loft apartment and begins to throw the apartheid-era cat among the new South African pigeons.
The best thing about Glass Roots, then, is precisely that it finally blows all that Shozoloza feel-good stuff out of the water. Coyne and Sargeant’s timing, in every sense, is spot on. Birdbrain, written and directed by Heinrich Reisenhofer, is a disappointing and derivative two- hander from Djamaqua Theatre Connection – the team who brought you Suip!, the brilliantly harrowing view-from-the-underside that wowed Cape Town earlier this year. Featuring incandescent, powerfully physical perfomrances from Oscar Petersen and Vincent Mybergh, Birdbrain rephrases elements of San mythology to tell a Men-to-Birds tale that is the kind of animals-as-humans political allegory so familiar in the words-with-mime work of Andrew Buckland and Lionel Newton. While the playing was great, the text is at present too long and strangely dated: it seems odd that talented young performers should be refighting old struggle- era battles from the 1980s. Tough pruning and text overhaul is needed.
Also just opened, More is a dynamic production by a cutting-edge University of Cape Town student team that takes the mainstream stage after an exciting on- campus production in December. More is a whirligig dance through ”clubbing, boy sex and goldfish”, and with terrifying precision Wild grabs hold of life as lived by lots of urban twentysomethings right now: rootless, disaffected, jobless and value-free. Value-free means in practice soulless drugs and sex, and seldom has the rent-boy syndrome been more adroitly visited. This is no dreary morality play, but a take on real life going down. Second time round, in a mainstream setting, it felt too long and protracted. But More is a rush of heady young theatre – and like all the shows featured above, it’s packing ’em in. So who said theatre in this town is dead? Glass Roots is on at the Baxter Theatre, Birdbrain is showing at the Gauloises Warehouse Theatre and More is running at the Nico Artscape Theatre Centre