It’s been a time of guts baring for Afrikaans theatre, but though Breyten Breytenbach has failed, Pieter Fourie has triumphed
Guy Willoughby
Behold the guilt-tinged, rudderless state of the Afrikaner psyche at the beginning of the 21st century. This month it has come under scrutiny in two oddly undramatic new plays by venerable Afrikaans playwrights.
Both Breyten Breytenbach’s Die Toneelstuk and Pieter Fourie’s Boetman is die Bliksem in! boast the alchemical presence of designer-director Marthinus Basson, who has breathed life into texts that are a breathless barrage of words.
Both plays point to the ways in which a once tightly controlled cultural and political Afrikaner elite organised for so long on avowedly ethnic lines is buckling under the strain of memory, of a past increasingly unpalatable to a younger, more open-minded generation. Most poignantly, we witness two writers in their sixties attempting to speak to that disaffected generation: Breytenbach in his own voice, Fourie through the accents of many others.
Generated by writers with rather different reputations forged in the apartheid years, these texts share an anger and an urgency that spills beyond the well-made play format into a torrent of conflicting voices with one telling difference.
Breytenbach aging enfant terrible of Afrikaans literature is recast, despite all Basson’s good offices, as a political reactionary; Fourie reinvigorated by the same director reappears as a radical, ready to re-engage, redefine, begin anew.
Basson’s failure to render Die Toneelstuk into viable theatre is a measure of Breytenbach’s ineptitude as a dramatist and his failure to say anything new and fresh about our politics indeed, to say anything at all.
Basson’s success with Boetman, by contrast, points to a genuine striving on Fourie’s part to arrive at answers by airing as many voices (he collected transcripts and interviews from many commentators) as possible.
Third in a kind of trilogy that includes Boklied (1998) and Johnny Cockroach (2000), Breytenbach’s Die Toneelstuk closed its run early at Cape Town’s Artscape Theatre on May 30. It comprised a bunch of actors declaiming a series of rambling discourses “word bursts” might be more accurate on freedom, God, art, politics and, apparently, whether white South Africans should apologise for apartheid or not.
Actually, the play was not really about any of these things, but was rather proof of the monstrously ballooning ego of the playwright and the noisy, possibly senile paucity of ideas he now has to air on our politico-cultural situation.
Trouble is, Breytenbach has no idea of what theatre is. His previous essays into dramatic form were mercifully salvaged by the indefatiguable Basson, who managed to turn the poet’s peculiar blend of rant and bombast into diverting visual spectacle. But this time Basson couldn’t save him.
We’d seen all these turns before, including the ritualistic disrobing of just about everybody, the performance of arabesques by actors in fancy costumes, the exchange of meaningful stares while other actors hold forth and so on.
Breytenbach’s error is to have the arrogance, born of his long tenure as “moral conscience to the volk” (self-appointed, but for too long endorsed by Afrikaner cultural mandarins), to assume that his brand of stammering, “poetic” invective makes intellectual as well as dramatic sense. In practice, all the audience came away with was an awareness of a writer far removed from political actualities. His intervention now retards rather than fosters that recreation of identity that white Afrikanerdom so desperately needs.
Fourie’s text, or texts, performs much harder ideological and dramatic work than Breytenbach’s entire epic word-salad. Boetman is die Bliksem in! (“Brother is the hell in”, roughly translated) replays an exchange of newspaper letters, and a welter of responses in other media, initiated by one Chris Louw in 1999.
Louw, a 40-something medical doctor, accused the older generation of Afrikaner leaders in the person of Willem de Klerk, brother of the ex-President of misleading a younger generation of Afrikaner males, now aged 35 to 55, into fighting and dying for the despicable cause of apartheid.
There’s a piquant irony that Fourie is the dramatist who has given this polemic dramatic shape. Fourie made his reputation during the 1960s and 70s, abetted by the apartheid-era performing arts councils, and by contrast with Breytenbach’s principled indictment in those years of state hegemony his work soothed rather than stirred controversy in Afrikanerdom. In effect, he was an apologist for the apartheid regime. Now, no longer.
Boetman is die Bliksem in! compels because it throws a harsh, revealing and controversial light on Afrikanerdom’s view of itself post apartheid and its loss of political power. Basson’s masterful, brilliantly controlled stagecraft turns this dramatic curiosity into a major and traumatic sea change in cultural identity.
As opposed to Breytenbach’s arbitary division of text between characters who are the barest ciphers, Fourie gives Basson a series of clearly etched speakers from a variety of political, class and sexual backgrounds with which an outstanding cast is able to work.
David Minnaar renders a variety of individuals a right-wing saboteur, the typical unthinking conscript, a gay soldier, among many others with breath-taking delicacy and precision.
Two stage veterans, Sandra Kotze and Cobus Roussow, are simply and devastatingly convincing as typical members of that older generation who have misled the volk. Only newcomer Albert Snyman seems out of kilter with these experienced stage titans.
Why should the rest of us care about this painful churning in the Boere breast? Isn’t it slightly pathetic that white Afrikaners, of whatever generation, seem to have only just woken up and smelled the moerkoffie, and realised what the rest of us who aren’t necessarily white, male or Afrikaans have known for decades: that apartheid was a shameful crime against humanity and that Afrikaners were misled into believing their cause, as apartheid’s upholders and chief beneficieries, was just?
Well, the play matters because Fourie’s reportage is a revelation of quite how completely Afrikanerdom was cut off hermetically sealed, in fact from other ideological options or debates in the apartheid years. The rich gamut of voices heard reminds us, too, that the Afrikaans language remains a deeply moving and pliable vehicle for expressing the experience of being in Africa.
Most importantly, Boetman is die Bliksem in! insists that if nation building is ever to have any meaning outside of the comfortable platitudes of party caucuses, the kind of agonised guts baring we witness here is vitally necessary for all of us.
Boetman is die Bliksem in! is showing at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town until June 30; at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown on July 4 to 7; at the State Theatre Arena in Pretoria from July 10 to 21; and at the Springs Civic Theatre on August 1 and 2