Guy Willoughby Collaborations 2000, a month-long season of new South African plays jointly presented by the Cape Town Theatre Laboratory and Artscape, opened at the Nico Arena last week with Bheki Mkhwane and Grieg Coetzee’s riveting one-man play Solomon’s Pride – an extraordinary piece of performance art that deserves much more than its brief five- night slot on this bill. Yet we must be grateful, it seems, that this gritty, fascinating excursion into an old Zulu mineworker’s life and emotions has surfaced in Cape Town at all. Collaborations involves more than an artistic cross-pollination of various actors, writers and directors: the event signals Artscape’s desire to reinvent itself as a site of challenging performing art and also represents the mainstreaming of the Lab. Solomon’s Pride is a dramatic tour de force of titanic proportions, achieved out of a paltry set of materials: an upturned drum, a pair of gumboots, a hat and walking stick.
Crafted around the central motif of waiting, that depressing South African reality for far too many in this country, Coetzee and Mhkwane’s play offers the bitter-sweet texture of a life invested with pathos, humour, triumph, reversal … all the stuff that flesh is heir to. In particular, through Mhkwane’s mercurial, finely poised performance, we can trace the ancient art of Zulu storytelling invested with the trappings of contemporary reality. Mkhwane, whose well-known comic mime collaborations with Ellis Pearson have wowed successive Grahamstown festival audiences, displays a comic mastery and assurance that is quite disarming because it is so unfamiliar. Solo stage offerings are often burdened by the egos of their performers. Not here. No wonder that in KwaZulu-Natal the play was showered with awards. Mainstream managements are now keen to bring the play back for a decent run in Cape Town, but – extraordinarily – Jo’burg has yet to see it.
But then, this is what Collaborations is all about – providing oxygen and opportunity, for new local work. The Lab’s artistic director, Warrick Grier, reckons that “the plays showcase the Lab’s commitment to empowering and educating theatre practitioners and to promote theatre in all its diversities.” Grier is particularly concerned that Collaborations brings nationwide work to Cape Town: “Solomon’s Pride is from KwaZulu-Natal and this week we feature Gorfinkel and Son, created by Joss Levine and Craig Freimond, a story from and about Johannesburg; then follows three new plays generated at the Lab. Sabata Sesiu’s The Blue Song, Going Home, directed by Royston Stoffels and finally Rehane Abrahams’s What the Water Gave Me. There’s a range of subject matter and styles here that should appeal to a wide cross-section – like last year’s programme.” The Theatre Laboratory, established in Cape Town two years ago, cooperates with its Jo’burg opposite number but sets out, according to Grier, to “share skills, exchange workshops and expertise. Education is a large part of our brief; we go out to rural areas and townships across the Western Cape.” Has the Lab been happy with Artscape’s involvement? Grier considers. “Our future depends on partnerships with smaller theatres – operations more like ours. But the Nico came to the party very well.” In the continuing ferment as managements, theatres and practitioners painfully regroup and regather, Collaborations marks the kind of partnership between mainstream management and alternative practitioners that is the way out of theatre’s doldrums in the Cape. Gorfinkel and Son is on until October 21; The Blue Song runs from October 24 to 28; Going Home, October 31 to November 4; and What the Water Gave Me runs from November 7 to 11 at the Nico Arena. For more information Tel: (021) 4109849