Guy Willoughby
theatre
Is the Spier Summer Festival’s avowed commitment to excellence and the immediate community actually working? With the fifth annual Festival three-quarters through it runs from November to March it’s a good juncture to take stock. Their latest production, the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story a rumbustious retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is an odd mix of 1950s New York and, um, South Africa somewhere, sometime. Set amid the bitter teenage gang warfare of New York City’s West Side, in 1957 it may have felt like social documentary, but in South Africa today it takes on an urgent topicality, given the gang in-fighting on the nearby Cape Flats.
West Side Story vividly illustrates Spier management’s dilemma: how do you foster international standards while putting lots of keen disadvantaged local bums on seats? These are, after all, the objectives set out in their mission statement. The problem, as the management team concede, is that so many have been alienated for so long from the performing arts traditions with which Spier hopes to compete internationally: opera, musical theatre and “classical” music. Dick Enthoven proprietor of Spier, whose vision and determination have made the entire operation possible is warily optimistic: “I believe we are learning from current mistakes in marketing and production choice and in that time-frame we’ll get the balance of local and international talent just right.”
Spier’s head honchos point enthusiastically to the “pay what you can” system as a great fillip in accessing untried local audiences. According to development staffer Zwelibanzi Sibiya, instrumental in setting up the system, an average subsidised busload of 60 to 120 patrons a night have been visiting the theatre from surrounding townships this season. “Using Xhosa and Zulu in our productions overcomes traditional resistance to attending shows. Little steps here are major steps towards audience development,” Sibiya says. Of a house of 1?200, 120 may indeed sound like a little step; also, Enthoven agrees Spier has encountered resistance from “traditional mainstream” (read white) audiences.
New artistic director Mark Dornford-May observes that on three separate occasions patrons pointedly left The Mysteries, Spier’s Christmas offering, when black actor Vumile Nomanyama announced at the beginning, “I am God”. “I couldn’t believe that kind of prejudice in 2001,” says Dornford-May. “This is an African country, isn’t it?”
Dornford-May concedes that new audiences bring new problems: “It takes time to acquire theatre manners and expectations both in the cast and audience members. What I chiefly want to overcome is this idea that South Africans are inherently inferior to overseas performers, especially as overseas practitioners themselves agree that this country is now an artistic powerhouse.”
Eve Annecke, a Spier holding company director, believes that marketing is the key as Spier contemplates the uneven sales record for the season. “The Mysteries was an unknown quantity. Audiences were possibly put off by the lengthy treatment of the Bible. Carmen, arguably the worlds’ favourite opera, was full for its first two performances, which augurs well for the rest of its run. Advance Booking for West Side Story looks promising.” Unlike the concurrent Spier production of Carmen, West Side Story rightly remains true to time and place sort of. The Manhattan setting is loosely retained in costume, props and manners, but mangled entirely in speech; Wing-Davies allows a bizarre cross-section of American accents that range from passable to appalling to non-existent. Allowing for the diversity of local cast background, many of whom (as the management never tires of telling us) have never been on stage before this summer, overall diction is poor indeed as if the director isn’t interested whether we hear Arthur Laurents’s (witty, gritty) book or not. Saddled with a directorial decision not to mic anyone, which renders certain cast members inaudible as well as incomprehensible, audiences are left with the sheer zest and pace of the show to carry them from one scene to another. If this is to be the Spier norm in future, might it not be an idea to install surtitles up above, so we could at least read the words? As the tragic young lovers who cross the no man’s land between the warring “Sharks” and “Jets”, Kurt Haupt as Tony and Tsakane Maswanganyi’s Maria radiate an affecting charm. What both lack is frankly experience in sustaining command of a stage. Among gang members, Helen Burger’s Anybodys and Babalwa Sihele as Consuela shine. Delia Peel’s set is stark, harshly lit and brutally stripped-down. The juxtaposition of gloomy empty-lot exterior scenes with intimately detailed interiors is adroitly achieved, mainly through cunning use of a battered four-sided trailer that gets trundled a touch noisily around the vast Spier stage. Imbumba, the Spier orchestra under the baton of Charles Hazelwood, is infectiously on form: the syncopated rhythms, jazzy inflections and rich harmonics of Leonard Bernstein’s score are rendered with dash and brio and faultless, breathless timing. Terry John Bates’s choreography, especially of the fight sequences, is just right supple, balletic, and expressionistic, the latent and actual violence of the gangs deftly suggested in the rhythms of the dance ensembles rather than by stark naturalism. There is a danger, in my view, that “Africanising” Spier festival (in Dornford-May’s words) may lead to risky decisions in casting and performance style. But, hey, they are tackling the challenges with gusto. Spier are trying to bridge the yawning gaps between expectation and reality, and that’s perfectly in sync with what the rest of South Africa is doing right now or should be.
West Side Story runs at the Spier Estate in Stellenbosch until March 17. For a full programme visit www.spierfestival.co.za