Playwright and former exile Anthony Akerman’s career is symptomatic of the ruptures apartheid visited on us all Guy Willoughby Anthony Akerman’s latest play, Comrades Arms – a racy farce about an ex-leftie political exile reduced to running a bed- and-breakfast on the Garden Route – opens at the Wits Theatre this week after a rousing debut at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. Meanwhile, Witwatersrand University Press have recently published Dark Outsider: Three Plays, a handy and engrossing entr’e to the Akerman universe. Time to take stock, for – after 10 years back from a long, self-imposed exile himself – this is truly Akerman’s moment, proof positive that, fulfilling the exile’s dream, he has at last arrived. Akerman’s career is symptomatic of the ruptures apartheid visited on us all, and the appeal in his work is the drama he has made out of his sense of displacement. After a standard well-heeled Wasp training – rugger at Michaelhouse, rigour at Rhodes – Akerman left South Africa in political disgust right after graduating from drama school in 1973, only to return nearly 20 years later in 1990. While away, Akerman built a considerable directorial career in Europe and as a writer vented his political anger in the epoch-making Somewhere on the Border (1986) – an “army play” that also neatly tapped into autobiography. Since returning to South Africa, Akerman has rephrased and solidified the theme of exile and its discontents in the series of plays we now have happily to hand: A Man Out of the Country (1989), Dark Outsider (1995) and Old Boys (1996). In A Man Out of the Country a political exile called Tristan – who in Celtic legend, tragically, never consummates his love for Isolde – is trapped in Holland in a dying relationship with a Dutch woman who tries but cannot staunch his sense of loss. At play’s end, we sense a man so psychically depleted by exile that even political liberation in South Africa, we suspect, will not shift him home. In Dark Outsider, Akerman’s magnificent recreation of the life and career of tortured and grandiloquent poet Roy Campbell, we witness the artist writhing unhappily in Europe, cut off from his creative uges in South Africa, trapped like his predeccessor Tristan in a union with a woman “who doesn’t understand”. Says Akerman: “Campbell chooses Mary, who has sexually betrayed him, over South Africa, and ceases to function as a writer. That is his tragedy.” Again: depletion, inertia, a kind of death in life. Of the three plays, only Old Boys is firmly set in South Africa itself and in this harrowing recasting of the punishing private-school ethos of Akerman’s schooldays, we feel Julian, the principled school rebel, poised (like a young James Joyce, whom he assidously and ostentatiously reads) for flight, for exile.
Now, in Comrades Arms, we have the exile returned, Ulysses back home in domestic bliss – though the returnee’s wife, suspicious about his interest in the nubile hired help, still “doesn’t understand”. Also, we have a teasing comic innovation: bedroom farce, complete with slamming closet doors and itsy bits of ladies’ lingerie. Is this Akerman not so much settled down as sold out, pandering to popular audiences now that liberation, in practice, has all but sounded the death- knell of state-subsidised theatre? Akerman, musing with me over these themes, is mildly irritated by the sniffy tone of some reviewers in Grahamstown, including the suggestion that the genre trivialises women. “I chose farce as my genre because it seemed right for the ironies I wanted to explore in our situation – and if it’s a popular genre, what’s wrong with that? No one knocked Shakespeare for mounting plays that attracted a broad audience. “Yes, I see a certain irony in Anthony Akerman, returned exile with high, idealistic expectations of the New South Africa, writing a play about a returned politico-poet who’s compromised with capitalism.” A wistful pause: “When I came back, I had hopes of wonderful revitalised theatre, decent government subsidies, no censorship … I did not envisage theatres being turned into conference centres for corporations!
“I chose farce, however, because it is what I wanted to do, it is right, not because I am pandering to commercialism in a hard climate.”
Regarding the recurrence of the exile in his plays, Akerman prefers to see a more familiar 20th-century trope: “Most of my protagonists are first and foremost outsiders. The man character in Somewhere on the Border is called, by sheer coincidence, Campbell – he’s the rebellious guy who goes awol, is caught, and suffers retribution.
“By the way, in researching that play in 1982 I interviewed many ‘patients’ who had been tortured by the infamous Dr [Aubrey] Levine at 1 Military Hospital, as detailed in the recent expose in the Mail & Guardian. Those revelations entered into the texture of the play back then.” With regard to Dark Outsider, Akerman points out that “Campbell the poet, as the title insists, is very much the outsider in that play – outside polite, European literary circles, outside his own country. Tristan in A Man Out of the Country is an outsider even in exile. Julian, the dissenter in Old Boys, who accepts a House prefectship, tries both to conform and to rebel – to play the system at its own game – and doesn’t succeed. Did Akerman set out to write about the exile’s return, ousider become insider, in Comrades Arms? “I did think that writing about returning would come to me, but I had no story to hang it on. As I point out in the programme, it was Albie Sachs who gave me my plot – he told me about a returnee of our acquaintance, an out-and-out communist, now running a guest house. “When I told Stephen Gray about this the next day, he insisted: ‘That’s your next play.’ I’d been handed a wonderful brief – an opportunity to set a farce, not in the stockbroker’s belt in Surrey, but in South Africa. And taking the piss out of myself too.”
All of the plays in the new collection were adapted for Radio South Africa/SAfm – in two instances before being staged in the country – and like other stage writers Akerman laments the demise last year of radio drama. “It’s an absolute disgrace that this wonderful dramatic form, which enables you to mount a play with a cast of thousands at no cost, should have disappeared for all the wrong political reasons.
“Radio is a fantastic discipline because it relies on the word – the most neglected aspect of our theatre, being the negative legacy of the workshop method. The SABC dropped it because ‘the audience was only 7E000 people’. That’s the number you attract to a good seven-week run in Jo’burg! The loss of all that technical expertise, that opportunity for writers in every performance medium, is incalculable.” Akerman has garnered numerous well-deserved awards for his work, but it has taken several years for him to feel accepted – an insider once again. “Working abroad in a protected environment in Holland meant it was a struggle to adapt to tougher circumstances in South Africa. I love it here intensely, and don’t want to leave ever again. I just know being an exile is a very, very alienating experience.
“Would it be less so for a dentist, an estate agent? For a writer, you are faced with choices: what stories do you want to tell? My well is my youth. I wouldn’t get a hard-on, for instance, to write a Dutch play. That never tempted me. That’s why Campbell tugged at my heartstrings. “After 10 years back here, it’s taken a long time for people to get used to me being around. Now, there are those in the business who’ve forgotten I’ve been away.” A satisfied pause: “I’m included. No doubt about that.” Comrades Arms opens at the Wits Theatre on September 5. Dark Outsider: Three Plays (Witwatersrand University Press) is available at leading bookstores or e-mail [email protected]