Thebe Mabanga theatre
Every week night for the better part of this holiday season, the stars put on a show at the Market Theatre. Only the shows are not for free, and the stars do not number 1?000 actually it’s just eight. Three of these stars feature in Call Us Crazy at the Barney Simon theatre upstairs. The balance is in They Shoot Extras, Don’t They? at the main theatre downstairs.
In fact, were it not for space constraints the latter show could consist of 1?000 stars or, rather, aspiring stars. This is because it tells the story of a group of strangers who try their luck as extras on a movie set. Without any acting experience and dreams of stardom in their heads, their stumbles and sincere attempts at acting make for comical viewing. The individual performances lift a straightforward story and tell it humourously.
The most interesting feature of the storyline is the reversal of a popular South African stereotype. Three-quarters of South African tales of the pursuit of stardom begin with a trek from some obscure part of the country to Johannesburg.
Here, Vuyo?(Nicodemus Moremi) and Errol (John Kincaid) hitchhike from Johannesburg to Babanango, KwaZulu-Natal. This is the setting for a movie about the battle of Isand-lawana, the same battle that inspired Mbongeni Mgema’s The Zulu.
Director Bruce Koch based the play on his experiences some 25 years ago when he tried his luck as an extra for a movie called Zulu Dawn. He notes frankly how, over the years, he has staged some good plays and bad ones.
The acting in this production sets it firmly in the former category, but the linear storyline threatens to nudge it incrementally towards the latter.
Dan Robertse recently took the Market Laboratory students through their paces to help them workshop Fong Kong; in this he shows them what he meant with a functional performance as an assistant director who does all the directing. Kincaid almost steals the show not as Errol but as Benny, a Dutch bar owner whose establishment is probably the only one in a one-horse town where the horse is ageing but not yet dead.
Both Call Us Crazy and They Shoot Extras are brilliant examples of showmanship and they seek to be nothing more.
They are perhaps a reflection of how, since the departure from protest theatre, South African theatre is going through a phase where we try to find voices that can tell genuinely South African stories.
The voices need to be a combination of the old (Koch and Robertse) and the new (Josias “Dos” Moleele and Mncedisi Shabangu in Call Us Crazy). If these voices choose to use humour to tell these stories, then so be it. So long as it is not pandering, politically correct farce.
They Shoot Extras, Don’t They? is at the Main Theatre at the Market until December 23. Enquiries: tel (011) 832 1641