The Plays of Miracle and Wonder
by Brett Bailey
Double Storey
None of the flak Brett Bailey has attracted (and for which he continually blames the black intelligentsia) is directly attributed in his newly published commentaries and scripts. Of course, in his philosophical meanderings South Africa’s edgiest director refers often to the threat out there, something bearing down on him while he creates. In his self-portrayal he is almost like a character in his own ritualised dramas, being attacked from all sides by frenzied ancestral spirits.
For the sake of The Plays of Miracle and Wonder, the founder of the Third World Bunfight company has resolved to quote only the nicely worded press raves. And to lash out at some of the restrictions he witnessed in the theatre of his formative years: ”In the mid-Nineties I found most of the urban black theatre I had experienced formulaic — impoverished by the apartheid years when it had to serve as a medium of resistance and creativity and technique were often unnecessary frills.”
One is inclined to refer Bailey back further, to the Eighties, when Mbongeni Ngema came up with Sarafina, quaint and colourful as a township toy. Possibly, he was too young in the Seventies when Welcome Msomi toured the world with Macbeth as Mmabatha, complete with sangomas and a legion of Zulu warriors.
Instead of promoting himself as a break from the theatre past, and a continuation of ancient custom, Bailey may appease his black critics by showing just how much of a product of local theatre history he really is.
That Bailey is a product of apartheid is not in question. Like most white narratives Bailey’s book begins in his own backyard — Cape suburbia of the late 20th century. Here we find the youngster encountering ”a few maids my mom had employed” and convicts who had broken out of the nearby Pollsmoor prison — ”black men with hot breaths and murderous intent, crouching in the rockeries”.
This brief portrait of his childhood could be a scene from one of his plays. And he has spent the ensuing years enthralled at the possibility and latent energy of the writhing black mass.
Returning in 1994 from a spiritual year in India, Bailey turned his sights from the mysteries of the East to those of the homelier South. He then embarked on a path to discover ”the people who live beyond the barbed- wire fence”.
In the process Bailey travelled to Zimbabwe where, on a dry river bank, he seems to have had a metaphysical encounter with ”an immensely tall being. His skin was silver-blue and completely covered with large feathers or scales.” For Bailey this was ”the African Spirit, come to drink at the River of Life”.
But the river was dry and this is where Bailey got his message to undertake his mission of restoration. With this lofty purpose, Bailey has an answer for his African critics: ”When black sophisticates have challenged me ‘Why you messing with our culture, white boy?’ I’ve had a clear picture of a scaled snakeman communicating to me across the vistas of time and space.” Bailey’s recourse to this kind of rhetoric indicates an anxiety about cultural appropriation and authenticity.
Bearing his claim to the African trance-state, Bailey took off to the Transkei in search of a story to tell. This he found in Kokstad in March 1996 in the tale of witchcraft and murder surrounding the death of 12 youths killed in a kombi crash. Survivors told of the presence of 50 female spirits in the doomed vehicle’s headlights.
The play was called Ipi Zombi. Its title references Ipi Tombi, South Africa’s much-lambasted work of the Seventies on the Jim Comes to Jo’burg theme. Bailey refers to his play as: ”A pun on the patronising hit musical drama, which was boycotted by conscientised blacks all over the world.”
His opinion provides an interesting detour. On the one hand he looks down at this internationally acclaimed musical. On the other hand he feels that he is above criticism himself. The issue is complicated by Bailey when he writes of Ipi Zombi in his workbook: ”The two realms — showbiz and ritual — can work together.”
He is at pains to stress, in the many conclusions he comes to, that there is more to his showbiz and ritual than just ”inflaming superstition”. But at the end of it Bailey is a conflicted soul trapped in the issue of whether one should consciously construct drama to change society.
About The Prophet, which deals with the sensitive subject of Nongqawuse, whose prophesies led to the Xhosa cattle-killings of the late 19th century, Bailey writes: ”This is supposed to be a period of reconciliation in our country, and a part of me really wants to make a dramatic offering to those who died so tragically, so unfairly. But there is another unsentimental (or twisted) side to me that watches from cold peaks, and enjoys too much the controversial, the macabre and the theatrical to make heartfelt monuments to the dead.”
Later he writes: ”Can art/drama really make a difference? Or are we who live along the margins of society just naive dreamers? Deluded prophets?”
This week sees the Cape Town staging of Bailey’s masterpiece iMumbo Jumbo, about the nutty Chief Gcaleka who went to Scotland in search of the missing head of his ancestor King Hintsa. This, he believed, would cure the country of its ills.
In his text Bailey explains how the mere belief that he had found Hintsa’s head carried enough ”symbolic value” for Gcaleka to reconcile some of the disparate forces at play. In the same way, one is tempted to argue that if cultural producers believe they’re making a difference, and if audiences believe it too — then who are we to argue?
iMumbo Jumbo is showing at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town until August 9.