Guy Willoughby
Q&A GRAHAMWEIR Letters from Patient Essop began life as part of a larger show with the Elastic Band. Now it’s a complete musical play on its own. Explain this gestation?
Essop has found its proper space and feels more complete now. I am not as emotionally linked to the mat- erial as I was, so I am more objective. This style suits the songs more, which are lyrically based, whereas the Elastic Band was a rock project.
How does this haunting tale of a man’s engagement with the outer reaches of his own sanity draw on personal experience?
The emotions are personal; the plot, or storyline, such as it is, is entirely fictional. Essop is part of me and where I was at a certain time. Yes, it is a kind of self-therapy, a way of talking to myself. All the other characters are aspects of who I was at that time.
Explain how the extraordinary sepia photographic slides work.
I found these old pictures in a shop at the top of Long Street [Cape Town], and selected about 50 at random. I took them home, laid them out, and thought: “This is Essop’s world.” Using the pictures as a frame, I wrote 15 to 20 letters to fit in with the pictures. This took away the personal element, and prevented the show from just airing my dirty linen in public. I had to force myself to be creative to stop going under.
The slides projected add a searing resonance.
I was interested in the era of the pictures I had: in the 1920s and 1930s, people are still self-conscious, they are caught between being just themselves, and posing as people do today. That awkwardness gives them a surreal, haunting aspect, and evokes a strange nostalgia. Yes, I wanted the show to be set anytime, anyplace, and the pictures both provide that and take that away.
A striking image that recurs is of a beautiful young man who is perhaps the unnamed correspondent of the letters?
Yes. Somehow Essop may see this young man again, and his recovery if that is the word is linked to this correspondent. Does Essop heal? He learns that he has the power of choice, and gradually that other people do feature in his life. It has always been in his power to resolve his own failings: this is what he approaches by the end of the play. He can stay in sepia forever, or he can move into colour as the pictures do at the end. His kind of madness is always a choice, and he takes a choice to step over from the imaginative to the real.
Where are you going to take the marvellous musical possibilities in this work next?
I am at work on a 16-part a cappella musical, called Noah in Cape Town, which is part of the positive energy and the new phase released for me by this show.
The details
Letters from Patient Essop is on until May 4 in the Sanlam Studio Theatre at the Baxter in Cape Town. To book call (021) 685 7880 or Computicket