Stephen Gray
Silence descends on a festival venue as the last audience heads off. Performers who have displayed all their talents, their heads echoing with the adrenaline of applause, wonder where the next job is. They start planning for the next National Arts Festival. Annual visitors who packed their programmes from breakfast to bed, cheaply and even riskily, leave the settler hamlet of Grahamstown to revert to torpor.
Here, from the second half of the 10 days, is a selection of highlights that linger in memory. As far as theatre is concerned they come in two kinds: the literary and the physical. These days instead of scanning the book readers are content to have it read out for them in staged biographies. Hence “My name is Katherine Mansfield, aged thirty-five”, as if we did not know, and rather a lot of “Virginia said ” and “Silly old David, DH that is.” Such prompts to us come in A Savage from the Colonies, an ingenious three-hander dramatising the Katherine Mansfield in question’s last day, before she coughs herself to death on the stairs, off-stage. Tugged between her Chummie, the gormless New Zealand brother killed in the trenches, and an interrogating older woman daemon, she proved deeply engrossing.
With much the same Bloomsbury references came our own William Plomer, most genially impersonated by Ralph Lawson in a play named At Home, after one of his autobiographies. Not overmuch of the “And Tom said to me, TS Eliot you know ”
There were poems of his read as fine, neat surprises, as if newly written. Plomer as a 1920 memorial settler apprentice farmer, up the road in the Stormberg, would have been relevant, but to have missed the scathing commentary he made about South Africa when he returned in 1956 was a lapse. Nevertheless, the vivid, impeccable character study was enjoyable, easier than the book.
I missed Reza de Wet’s chivvying over of Chekhov and the Dickens makeover by child dancers, symptoms of South Africans no longer wanting to take their classics on the page. For the rest, physical theatre is the compensating vogue: when literary English prose proves just too prissy and complex to articulate, resorting to the lithe, musical, dancing body is at least an African way out.
Take mime Andrew Buckland’s Makana, which with a cast of four (including himself) managed to stage the insurrection led by the prophet the settlers called Lynx. The performance culminated in no less than the siege of the Grahamstown garrison, on the very spot where we sat hunkered on scaffolding for the last time on our Standard Bank cushions. Styled “action theatre”, it was packed out with fellow footstompers.
Graham Weir in his double-bill, Mind the Gap, used music with an on-stage band to move his action along. A quite daffy blend of the theatrical possibilities, the songs haunted and were well sung, cabaret-style.
One good-looker called the Ha!man (Francios le Roux) took physical theatre to its logical light indeed, a feat of contortion. The extraordinary Cornelius Koopman, in Cock Tales, likewise soon had his leathers off in order to illustrate the cruisy bits of gay sex in Braamfontein. I was assured by an astounded busload from Uitenhage that none of that was ever even dreamed of there.
Then there was the much-publicised Big Dada, which did enjoy sell-out audiences screaming satisfied bravos, their worst nightmares of African unspeakableness come true. What is there to say about a spectacle that has its friendly narrator not only tortured into silence, but eaten by Idi Amin before the final curtain? Unnerving, to say the least, but possibly a wrong dramatic tactic, no matter how disorientating and repellent the subject.
Future sponsors will surely draw the line at our valiant performers resorting to cannibalism to sustain themselves.