The setting was the elegant school grounds of a boys’ school, Hilton College itself — above the burnt Midlands, between azaleas and wistaria — so a novelty for me was seeing bright schoolkids in neat uniforms nudging their elite parents, promising to explain the more modern jokes.
In the school’s superb theatre, productions such as Andrew Buckland’s Makana, Charles Fourie’s Parrot Woman, and Fiona Coyne’s Dearly Beloved ran in rotation. Twenty years before those same moneyed elders would never have left their cane plantations for such local fare, nor would even the hoi polloi have much cared to support them.
But nowadays it is Christopher Hampton’s pin-sharp translation from the French of Yasmina Reza’s Life x 3, hot from Paris and London, which seemed the one out of place. Coyne’s play on the same ground, likewise featuring two couples bickering on and on, but not half as good, got the richer laughs. South Africans at art festivals are no longer so culturally displaced; now they prefer to recognise themselves.
A fixture at such cultural buzzes must be Marc Lottering, whom all South African TV-watchers seem to know for his astute rudeness. But actually witnessing him in person spurt through his quick-change, stroppy Hotnot routines in From the Cape Flats with Love, is more of an endearing experience than an affront. The warning was posted: suitability — strong language. But the more “Ma se moer” from his toothless aunties, the more those visiting schoolgirls shrieked.
Surely a fixture at future festivals will be rising star Ben Voss in his own Men’s Night (suitability — adults only). With a set that cost R34 and out on the fringe, that is in the Band Room beyond the lawns of the sports club, he also gave a many-roled one-man virtuoso performance. Just as Lottering, by being genial, managed to say the unsayable (about class disadvantages, the slum condition), so Voss goes over what that sporty, middle-class whitey simply could not otherwise express: why he wanked in the showers, had to go all the way to Thailand to have real sex.
Voss also appeared in Greig Coetzee’s neat flashback to student days in the 1980s, Seeing Red. That was a show obviously destined to run for ever.
The simultaneous Craft Festival brought in more spenders, with class stalls offering more than the usual roadside truck. I came back with a cat’s scratch post and could have picked up two trout-rod covers for the price of one. At the Brainfest, Phaswane Mpe signed copies of his first book with the University of Natal Press, as did Jane Curruthers and Fransjohan Pretorius with their new ones, all after careful addresses.
In the massive food tent, with stalls selling anything but junk — scuds, pasta, Taj Mahal and plates of homemade Ayshire cheeses — came the Epworth Marimba Band. They were four bouncy young black ladies, chewing gum, rippling away.
That was when the whole of KwaZulu-Natal, it seemed, on the top of a hill above all of the Africa they knew, came to a halt. Just open-mouthed at the beauty of where and how they live. Privileged.
Then on through the picture galleries to the South African Evensong in that sturdy chapel, a memorial to those who died for their descendants to enjoy such a spring harvest of potential.