Stephen Gray My sample of this year’s Aardklop festival – three shows and a literary caf’ event – was indeed modest. That I realised when, queueing outside yet another school-hall, I helped one frenzied audience member sort out his 53 Computicket printouts. And he was going to make only half the total events of the five days. So I had decided to specialise by following the old Anglo-Boer South African War theme, seeing as little old Potchefstroom was coping nowadays with its one catastrophe: the concentration camp cemetery that you drive in past and have to exit by. Nor was I sure that, with most of Afrikanerdom’s otherwise unemployed performers on riotous display, I had chosen well: spending the morning watching up-and- coming Sean Else, member of a boy-band called Eden, and reputed to bring audiences to their knees among the quartet of male strippers in Playboys. Now he was taking on all of Deneys Reitz’s very sombre Commando as a solo vehicle as well. Admittedly he had the assistance of three people performing what must be the lousiest job in showbiz: making expressionist battlescapes under a huge flowing floorcloth, exploding about him, betraying him, rippling away and occasionally enveloping him protectively. This was the terrible baptism of a nervy 17-year-old, wearing next to nothing and drenched in a bloodbath, who emerged from his hour-long campaign a croaking ruin. Unlike most of his mates, he was still alive, though. Adaptation and direction by the extraordinary Deon Opperman. By contrast, entirely sedate and more of the “then Emily Hobhouse said to me” type of theatre, was in its way an equally affecting, wonderful piece called Tot die Dood Ons Skei. This was the love story of dear Free State president Marthinus Steyn who, after doing everything in his power to prevent that war, literally went into paralysis as an expression of his ineffectuality.
Yet who would have thought that, with his one functional hand, he could continue to write such letters of longing to his sweet wife, and in English too (partly so that the military censors would suspect nothing underhand). And that she, the feisty Scottish Tibbie, who had loved him since she was 12 and was now kept a prisoner by her own countrymen, would be allowed to reply in kind. The show’s beginnings lay in a reading of these treasured exchanges a year ago, and has been extended by Ian Roberts into a play (with Hel’ne Lombard and Chris Vorster as the pair, and the irreplaceably lovely Rika Sennett as their organising angel). Utterly convincing was the manner in which the Steyns skipped from heaviest High Dutch (for dread state occasions), to endearing English for their private bits and pieces and into the new, sparking Afrikaans (for screaming at the children). That was the reality of life a century ago, and it carried a fascinated audience along, while Opperman’s Reitz had merely transposed his Faber & Faber-style English into the contemporary Taal, apparently without problem. Now due is a version of the young Reitz’s uncleaned-up original manuscript, more the stumbling human story and less the valiant propaganda. A stranger pairing was that between “Sol” (for Outa Solomon T Plaatje) and, can you believe, “Tot”, for “Totius”, or the very Calvinist Reverend du Toit), whose museum annex sheltered the literary events? (Peanuts and iced chardonnay coolers casually about.) The comparison between them was irresistible: they were coevals of the North West, who both kept and had published their diaries detesting the war. Both were Bible-brought up and anti-booze; if they could, they both would have stopped the trains running on God’s day. However, an affable panel debate about why the two never actually met seemed a bit pointless, when the reason obviously was that the old white baas would never in a whole month of Sundays have welcomed any native representative inside his own house. Now, at least, the festival has seen to it that Plaatje is invited … The final show for me was poor. But never mind, I caught as a bonus an utterly irreligious group on the village green along Tom Street, past the sosaties and the tomaties and the foot-long boerewors rolls and tents full of braided syrup. They were called the Grafsteensangers (read: Tombstone Troupe). Enough to awake even the dead from their syringa-scented sleep.