An exploration of exile penned by top writer Zakes Mda — due to premiere at the National Arts Festival this week — promises to be an explosive mix of memories, attitudes, forms and a searching look at ideals and reality in South African society today.
The Bells of Amersfoort marks a dynamic collaboration between top Dutch and South African talents. Mda wrote the text and music, based on the experiences of South Africans living in exile in the Netherlands; the performers are drawn from two companies — one Dutch, one Gauteng-based — who specialise in multicultural experience; and the director, Aram Adriaanse, is Dutch too.
The Benoni-based Sibikwa Players have long worked with challenging political content; De Nieuwe Amsterdam — “the New Amsterdam” — is a physical theatre company that, as its name suggests, looks at the new multi-ethnic society taking root in Holland.
Mda, snatching time to talk between theatre workshops at the Market Theatre, is a daunting creative dynamo, expressive in painting, music, theatre and fiction — and racing to meet the next creative rendezvous. “Right now, fiction excites me completely, and I can’t wait to get to my computer each morning,” he says. “I don’t know why this is, but I’m glad of it. Stage writing used to be agony!”
The Bells of Amersfoort was commissioned by the Sibikwa Players and De Nieuw Amsterdam, following a series of performers’ exchange programmes between the two companies. As Mda had never been to Holland before, and the company wanted — in his words — “a play on the relations of the two countries”, he spent two weeks in the Netherlands as writer in residence with De Nieuw Amsterdam.
Says Mda: “I decided to write a play that is current rather than historical, strongly influenced by South Africans’ experiences there. A black woman, Thami Walaza, has lived in exile in the small town of Amersfoort for 20 years … This is my first work that addresses that theme, but my focus is on South Africa today.”
Aram Adriaanse, after more than 25 years in Netherlands theatre, brings to the project a cosmospolitan viewpoint, grounded in his work with polyglot performers from around the world. For him the play comments on “the changed situation Thami finds after her exile. Her fiancé back home is no longer an activist but is in government, and the changes bring about the end of their relationship.”
As a writer Mda has long challenged conventional notions of struggle and liberation — his seminal early play We Shall Sing for the Fatherland (1977) depicts a shabbily betrayed post-liberated African society, while the marvellous, teeming novel Ways of Dying (1996) interrogates “struggle”-era values and practices with an unflinching but humorous eye. How does the “new” South Africa look to a returned exile in his new play?
Mda — who is about to release his fifth novel, The Madonna of Excelsior — concedes his take on current day South Africa is “cynical, because I am cynical about many aspects of society now. Thami comes back with the values of the liberation struggle, and these do not apply any more. However, I am an optimist — there are many, many things I like here — and that colours the play too.”
The Bells of Amersfoort — the title refers to the looming, ever-present Lang Jan church tower in this small Dutch village, symbol of accommodations an exile has to make — combines a wealth of stage devices. Dutch, Surinamese and South African music, differing performance styles, and shifts in time and place are all rendered in what Adriaanse calls “Mda’s poetic language, which makes the play a kind of musical theatre piece in words”.
In this way the play accords with Mda’s latter novelistic enterprises, which similarily combine the resources of different art forms to create a fiction that in its dense layering seeks, in his words, to “open up objective reality: some have called that ‘magic realist’, which is fine by me although it’s not my term. What I seek to do is to reach into history, to show how it shapes the present. Perhaps that is as true of this play as of my fiction.”
The Bells of Amersfoort has already played to enthusiastic audiences in Holland, and both Mda and Aram Adriaanse are keen to see how South Africans will respond to the issue and styles of the play. “Dutch theatre-goers were moved by the emotions of a person completely cut off from her world; the political content is only know to us by television,” says Adriaanse.
As director Adriaanse had to work with the varying stage experiences, and performance modes, of the Sibikwa Players and De Nieuwe Amsterdam. “There is a great difference between Dutch and South African acting styles,” he reckons. “The South Africans are used to pleasing the audience, to interracting with them in a very direct way, and to using singing and dance. We are used to playing with the audience as fourth wall — in other words, to performing as if the patrons are not there.
“I believe we have found a way to combine these two styles, and that is ideally suited to Mda’s poetic and musical text.”
No doubt audiences in Grahamstown — and subsequently at Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre and the Liberty Theatre on the Square in Johannesburg — are in for a theatrical experience as layered and challenging as Mda’s distinctive fictive adventures.
The details
The National Arts Festival takes place in Grahamstown from June 29 to July 6. For details: Tel: (046) 603 1103/1164 or visit www.natfest.co.za. For more festival previews, visit www.mg.co.za.