This year’s Aardklop festival, the fifth — stretching over five days last week — attracted to villagey, leafy Potchefstroom no less than 120 000 people to attend some 90 shows. My report of an attendance filling only two of those days, with a mere seven of those shows, must be understood to be an under-embrace of that most pleasant of spring rituals. Still, seven new, worthwhile plays are more than one gets to sample in Johannesburg these days in a month.
Drama was my direction, but I was not unaware that other types of festival were overlapping with my map-reading scramble from one school hall to the next. There was the ubiquitous Boere rock’n’roll in tents on the green, even on the steps leading up to buildings for a stage. There were mime artists (like John Jacobs) one way, the modern dancers (like Esther Nasser’s) the other. Cabaret, that adolescent variant on the school concert, was epidemic. I did not find the fine arts displays, or the music school where, yes, even an opera or two was pulling together on the usual festival staple: talent and sixpence.
And what happened to that old shibboleth of language purity on stage? Although most Aardklop events pretend to be in what is left of academic Afrikaans, this was hardly ever the case. Try a show like The Joseph and Mary Affair for a salmagundi of ripest Cape coloured, almost incomprehensible to the managerial classes, behind whose backs the old Nativity story was whipped up for a willing audience.
English, too, crept into the most diehard of traditional scripts. Even Pieter Fourie’s two-hander about Gert Garries, reworking Etienne Leroux’s Magersfontein novel, had its quota of the grand snob language, while in Die Laaste Aand — a fabulous musical re-enacting another canonical gem, a C Louis Leipoldt piece he surely would never have recognised — one astounding lady in the cast of 10 belted out her bit in English to a resonant Afrikaans support.
But only in South Africa could a performer (Frans van Rensburg), dressed up as a prisoner, recite the prison-poems of that sub-literature for which we seem to be so famous, and be supported by real prisoners lining the walls of the hall, out for the occasion from the local gaol.
Strange to attend a performance and be outnumbered by long-timers in their Raybans, clinking their tin cups and breathing down one’s neck the real thing: men’s prison songs.
In such company the Dennis Brutus, the Breyten Breytenbach goes down well enough, not to mention the Herman Charles Bosman and the Jeremy Cronin. But the one hoodlum I got a word in with shared my opinion: the likes of phoney-poets, such as Eugene Terre’Blanche and Allan Boesak, if that was all they could manage, should have all paper and pen forthwith confiscated. He meant, as he spat his sies, for the rest of their natural lives.
Coming through shiningly was the late Uys Krige (in Die Goue Seun), with Grethe Fox gorgeously playing her own grandmother and telling the family history. The performance ended with a tape of Uys Krige himself delivering a blasting harangue against the apartheid laws to come, which only served to keep him as a political undesirable off centre-stage. So, a triumphant return.
Ditto for Neil McCarthy’s vicious, witty Veldfire, a rerun of that Second South African Anglo-Boer War or whatever it is called, as we do our best to forget it. Never was a talented company’s taste so bad, nor your language so gemeng.