Alex Sudheim
theatre
In Seeing Red the first “fully-fledged” theatrical production by South Africa’s most famous “white man with a weapon” writer/director Greig Coetzee has essentially compressed two plays into one.
One is a sharp, acerbic satire of life in a student digs in Pietermaritzburg in the 1980s. Loaded with biting humour and classic farce, it’s a kind of South African The Young Ones with idiosyncratic local flavour. The other is a heavy-handed portrait of an age that clumsily attempts to nail down the political-existential zeitgeist of this era.
The play thus comes across as the dramatic equivalent of Siamese twins, one of whom is stronger and healthier than other but whose life-force is sapped by the weaker sibling. This results in the Hobson’s choice of severing the one twin and affording the other a chance to live, or letting them both endure a common fate. Unfortunately Coetzee opts for the latter and his play suffers as a result.
While there is nothing essentially wrong with a work that sets out to capture the spirit of an epoch incarnations of the genre inhabit the literary world from Vanity Fair to Generation X in the case of Seeing Red a fine idea became lost in the translation.
Instead of letting the story tell itself and allowing the audience to read between the lines, Coetzee goes out of his way to bludgeon them on the head with the points he makes. At these instances, the characters’ identity is suddenly suspended as they are transformed into hollow mouthpieces for the writer’s most explicit intentions.
It is almost as if Coetzee were working from a checklist every conflict, incongruity and tension experienced by university students in the final throes of apartheid South Africa is extant in the play, which upon these occasions takes on a painfully didactic tone.
For the most part Coetzee has successfully created an interesting bunch of characters based on his own exploits as a confused whitey in ‘Maritzburg in the 1980s, yet where Seeing Red could have illustrated its concerns through the subtleties of allusion and texture, the play is at such pains for you not to miss them that the political elements are hammed and unconvincing. The plot is too pat, the motives too transparent and the obsession with closure makes for one cringe-worthy finale.
Coetzee is at his best writing scabrous, trenchant deconstructions of the white South African male that embody countless political issues without ever having to explicitly state them. His women are flat and unconvincing and the most rounded character in Seeing Red is in essence a continuation of the masculine-identity-crisis themes he so brilliantly mined in his solo works White Men with Weapons, Breasts and The Blue Period of Milton van der Spuy.
Perhaps the transition from one-hander to ensemble cast is one requiring further evolution. Maybe the focus-pull from one-man-band to ringmaster warped the lens somewhat. Or perhaps as a period piece Seeing Red just got too annoyingly self-conscious and serious for the delicious Coetzee-esque scatology of that pun.
There is no doubt about the singular genius for mercilessly incisive scrutiny of human beings through caustic wit that Coetzee possesses. Yet in the case of Seeing Red the net was cast too wide and most of those fish should have been thrown back so he could focus on the few whose bitter blood was juiciest of all.