A rather unkind commentator, in his ruthlessly camp way, once described Brett Bailey as “the Stromboli of community theatre” — comparing the enfant terrible of South African theatre with the old man who created Pinocchio in that old European fairy tale.
It was a sourly humorous comment, both on Bailey, a
young white man, and on struggling young black theatre practitioners in this strangely barren landscape of post-apartheid culture.
Bailey’s stock in trade, as a director, is, indeed, to manipulate (as directors do) large companies of mostly untrained black actors in the telling of theatrical stories on an epic scale. But does this make him a puppeteer, as Stromboli was, creating lifeless puppets that miraculously learn the power of speech and eventually become almost human, as Pinocchio did?
Bailey has produced some remarkable work in this idiom that he has created for himself. The most powerful for me was his brave, multi-layered Imumbo Jumbo at the Market Theatre, which attracted brickbats from many of Johannesburg’s black glitterati because he, a white man, dared to stray into nervous African territory — a mixture of witchcraft, corrupt tradition and dodgy modern politics. Woven through all this were the themes of reparations, the righting of ancient colonial wrongs and the restoration of black dignity. How dare he dabble in this kind of debate, was the key response.
He has also scored some duds, which he himself will be the first to acknowledge. His exploration of the Nongqawuse legend at Grahamstown the following year was not nearly as successful. And yet he went ahead with his attempt at exploring that equally treacherous, shameful, unresolved episode of Xhosa history in seeming defiance of those who said he should lay off stuff that wasn’t part of “his” culture.
But then again, no one else was doing this kind of brave, extravagantly theatrical stuff. Why shouldn’t he?
Till now Bailey has been doing all his own work — researching and developing stories in his own time, on his own terms and in his own language — even doing his own choreography and sometimes going so far as to write his own music, which has tended to be a hit-and-miss kind of thing.
Now he has emerged into a different landscape, taking on a formal opera for a formal opera company and giving us something to think about once again.
Heaven knows what possessed Cape Town’s Artscape opera company to ask the wild and wilful Bailey to tackle Verdi’s Macbeth. Possibly it was a desperate attempt to find a solution to the problem of a dying art form. Opera, like ballet and classical music, has not had an easy time in the new South Africa. In fact, it has been under threat of slowly bleeding to death, with government cuts replacing the extravagant spending of the apartheid era, when “traditional, European” art forms were artificially propped up as part of the total onslaught against the forces of communism and incipient African darkness.
What Bailey has done is to give us a native version of Verdi, without changing a note. And it works remarkably well.
Macbeth is the ultimate tale of evil and human fallibility. It has witches and devils who, with remarkable ease, incite a previously incorruptible soldier to commit regicide and then wade further and further into rivers of blood in a series of desperate moves to hold on to power. It also has an ambitious wife who goads her husband on to these excesses and loses her mind, and her life, as a result. All in all, it is not exactly politically correct stuff.
Bailey takes this very Scottish story, adapted from English wide-boy Bill Shakespeare’s adaptation of an ancient Celtic legend and sung in incomprehensible Italian, and sets it firmly in the middle of his favourite Eastern Cape landscape.
Once again he has defied potential criticism. Is it not too obvious, indeed patronising, to thrust this motif of witchcraft and corruptibility into a black African context? What with the recent makeover of the Dark Continent into the noble image of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development and the African Union, in this age of the “African renaissance”, is it wise to encourage us to hark back to the image of the continent and its peoples that was created by the likes of Rider Haggard, Tarzan and Trader Horn?
The fact is that, in this day and age, it is hard to imagine Macbeth being played any other way. Although Bailey in some respects does not go far enough in his interpretation (the witches, for example, could have been much more extreme, as some critics have pointed out, and he could have gone further in his choice of mixing live and video imagery) the settings, the dramatic lighting, sets, costumes and make up, and the very presence of this largely black company of performers gives the telling of the story an edge that it is hard to imagine a “traditional” rendition of this opera achieving.
The central characters are magnificently sung and confidently portray the conflicting qualities of beauty, frailty, tragedy and evil that make this such a compelling play. And Bailey’s use of the chorus, painted with white clay and staring down with cold indifference on the unfolding proceedings, adequately makes up for the missed opportunity of the three witches (or “weird sisters”, as they should properly be called).
The proof of the pudding was in the eating. On the two occasions when I attended the show at Pretoria’s rather forbidding, apartheid-era State Theatre (almost as grim as the Voortrekker Monument) the audience was largely made up of the traditional Pretoria theatre constituency –white and middle class. Their “oohs” and “aahs” of appreciation for this appropriation of their traditional fare were a pleasure to behold.
The more philistine of our new elite have been heard to denounce the existence of “colonial culture” in our midst altogether. In his latest offering, Bailey shows us a middle way, where culture actually can be for everyone, after all.
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
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