Stephen Gray
review OFTHEWEEK
If this review is a review, then it is about a play about a play. The strategy is for me to tease you, even to bait you. I’ll even go as far as telling you how I deplore your trust, while nonetheless taking your time and money for my valiant effort. Such is the experience of attending Ryk Hattingh’s Eensnaar. Eensnaar is a one-man play about one man, but the question is, which man? The commission, which comes through on a cellphone, is for it to be about C Louis Leipoldt in Afrikaans to be premiered at what visitors to this peculiar country cannot believe is called the KaKa (Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees) arts festival in Oudtshoorn, where it opened a fortnight ago. But the author is situated in a certain remoteness: an island off an island, in other words New Zealand. Local ingredients taste all wrong for the potjiekos he spends time cooking up, following a recipe from a Leipoldt cookbook, not that we stay-behinds are ever offered a taste. Wine is sipped like fuel, by the audiences too, out of a box, one sniff of which would have rendered Leipoldt the great oenologist speechless. In the post Hattingh has received (but it seems not yet read) John Kannemeyer’s formidable recent biography of Leipoldt. All he has to fall back on is a battered collection of poems, taken into exile as the memento of the language that the master virtually invented single-handedly. Much is at stake in Hattingh’s script: if the work fails, it will probably take Afrikaans down with it. Hattingh tells us he should rather have done the piece about Arthur Cravan, the pugilist who stripped down on stage and proceeded to mutilate himself. For one performance only. But this spectacle was booked for the Klein Karoo festival, the State Theatre in Pretoria, where it is still running, the Sterrewag Theatre in Bloemfontein (May 16 to 19), the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (June 28 to 30) and then the Artscape Theatre Complex in Cape Town (as an Opdrag Production, directed by Mark Graham, August 29 to September 15). Out with it then: the one man is sturdy actor David Butler, the show’s best asset. Despite all the infuriating pussyfooting, in the end we do get from him what we figure we were going to get anyway, sort of: a few luminous, attention-holding readings of those classroom poetic gems. Once they spellbound a South African nation in the making that went wrong. Now they ache with nostalgia for what could have been. Hattingh could have made this presentation as a mixed grill, he says, or as a lecture that dozens of academics could apparently have delivered, suiting the syntax to the sinew of the subject. Instead we have this scramble, like the eggs we have to watch poor Butler cook up and actually eat. Hattingh does get in a comment or two about Maoris not being allowed to land at Durban to fight the Boers a century ago and a few f-words for the war criminals in our midst, responsible for our border wars, remember? But that is as sharp as it gets. Leipoldt himself never seems magically to step forth for us, fresh and alive, as we have a right to expect. Never are we asked to suspend our disbelief, relishing what theatre and nothing else does give us, as Leipoldt the dramatist knew well, after all. What is the point of a sance without ghosts?
Nor has the hottest research on Leipoldt reached Hattingh in his isolation. Why does the detail that Leipoldt could have been a “moffie” get the evening’s biggest snort when he was and the implications would have been deeply engrossing to pursue? Why does the fact that he grew the hell-in with tangled-up Jaaps and switched to English not get a mention, or even a demonstration?
I could go on, but I won’t, because this is not a review. Nor is Eensnaar a play.
Eensnaar runs at the Rendezvous at the State Theatre in Pretoria, Tel: (012) 322?1665, until May 12