Behold the post-apartheid hetero male! Guy Willoughby examinines a brace of comedies in Cape Town about male discontents
Try cross-referencing two genre-teasing comedies that announce new routes for Coloured masculine identity: Coco Merckel’s autobiographical No Room for Squares and the Oscar Petersen/David Isaac/Heinrich Reisenhofer collaboration, Meet Joe Barber, third in a wildly popular trilogy about a Mitchells Plain barber shop.
There’s a spirited Gauteng-vs- “Kaaps” dimension to these two outstanding plays. Merckel tours the drug-infested gangland of Johannesburg’s Westbury and Newclare townships; funnymen Petersen and Isaac recreate a small corner of the Cape Flats. Both shows brilliantly deploy a kind of nervy, seat-of-the-pants interchange with the audience at once dangerous and exhilarating, creating in the process the grounds of a truly vital populist theatre.
Merckel’s character-narrator relives the scars and insults of apartheid visited on his gender, family and neighbourhood; by contrast, the wacky street-corner habitues Joe Barber and Boeta Gamat bring the daily texture of ordinary life now way past apartheid insistently alive.
The by-now expected moment when Boeta and Joe pull theatregoers onstage and into the store is an incandescent moment of live theatre. The night I visited, the actors actually left two haplessly happy audience members “alone on stage”, “cleaning” the shop, for what felt like a full five minutes. This was a group suspension of disbelief seldom achieved in the theatre and possible only because these gifted actor-writers have located, trained and won their audience.
Add to this a presentation of Coloured working-class male identity in these central characters that foregrounds humour, tolerance, expression of feeling a kind of felt gentility and you have the grounds of a cultural achievement and intervention of huge proportions. This is principled art meeting truly popular culture at the richest, most fecund level.
Down at the pale-male end of the street things are as interesting, as provocative. Paul Slabolepszy, most seasoned spokesman on the “agon” of South Africa’s white heterosexual men, has produced in the feel-good, formulaic sports-jock farce Running Riot a fascinating essay on middle-class, middle-aged boys with, or without, their toys (in this case, running shoes).
The Slab’s gormless twosome Tjokkie and Crispin are as beloved of their audience as Joe and Gamat are of theirs, and the loud laughter here depends on the audience recognising the subtle deconstruction of white machismo at work.
Thin though the plot may be (it rehashes the 1995 crowd-pleasing Heal Against the Head), Running Riot nevertheless plays cheerily with a post-apartheid white manhood shorn, mercifully, of unpleasant racist or chauvinist baggage. And, in the word-defying brilliance of Bill Flynn’s tongue-mangled, fumble-fingered performance, the Slab has an actor whom a writer on white masculinity would surely die for.
Plewman, one-man renderer of Defending the Caveman the war- between-the-sexes comic turn that South African executives of both genders have now seen twice seems director of choice for plays about today’s pale menfolk. Certified Male is an Australian comedy by Scott Rankin and Glynn Nicholas, given an ineffective local tweak by cast and director, which explores the (harrassed, defensive, insecure) state of Men in Suits today.
This four-hander features some truly delightful, surprising stage turns from comic whizzes Gideon Emery, Graham Clarke and Tobie Cronje. Yet the take it offers on the threatened hetero fellow today doesn’t quite ring true, precisely because it lacks a convincing local habitation.
South African males just “aren’t” as weak-kneed and feeble as this lot witness Merckel, Petersen/Isaacs/ Reinsenhofer, and the Slab and it may be that we inhabit a much richer, more complex and demanding First World/Third World nexus than the anaemic late-capitalist, late-corporate milieu of these uninteresting suits from the Antipodes.
In that it proves how much more robust, colourful and engaged South African males really are, this dashing production of Certified Male serves a purpose. Perhaps South Africa’s menfolk are growing up at long last. Now, would someone like to give us an up-to-date urban black take on the topic?
The details
Catch No Room for Squares and Running Riot at the Baxter Theatre unil March 2. Certified Male is on at the Theatre on the Bay until March 9. Book at Computicket or Tel: 021 685 7880