/ 17 October 2005

Mad, bad and relative

A father sodomising his son, a serial killer rapist strangling victims with their G-strings, real-time domestic violence, a hijacker who beats up his girlfriend’s father, a vigilante Zulu ibutho with a machete, police officers coercing confessions by burning their suspects’ testicles with a lighter, explicit sex scenes … these are just some of the images in Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom’s Relativity: Township Stories, currently showing at the State Theatre in Pretoria.

Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year, Grootboom’s overthrow of ballet and opera on the State Theatre stage comes just months after the New Partnership for Africa’s Development-sponsored Sing Africa Dance!, which relentlessly celebrated the ubuntu aspect of the African renaissance. Relativity depicts a violent and unforgiving society in a visceral and graphic manner.

What is Soweto-born Grootboom’s artistic purpose? ‘Half the time you don’t think about politics or what is going on in the country when you don’t have money for bread. I can go many weeks without knowing what’s going on. So when I write I choose the time when people are not aware of political happenings.”

His brutal portrayal comes from the gut. ‘I’m living in Pretoria Central, and many things I see, even here, are so graphic in terms of violence, they do have an impact on you. Sometimes you want to tell those things and not shy away from things that may offend or harm people.”

Cards, Grootboom’s previous work — centred on a whorehouse, a Nigerian pimp and a paedophile judge — drew fire for not questioning the actions of his characters and tending towards glamorisation and titillation. He pleads innocence, saying he had not considered that the women in the rape scenes might seem to be enjoying themselves. ‘When I thought about it, it was always on a simplistic level — that it’s wrong, that this shouldn’t be done to anyone. I didn’t think that the way you stage it may send unintentional messages to people.”

But he is adamant that his brutal realism is justified. ‘There’s terrible things happening in some of the townships and I don’t see how you can write about it if you try to elevate it. The script was written with a brutal intention, but in the direction I pushed for even more. For instance, there’s a scene where the boyfriend beats his girlfriend and the actors actually beat each other for real on stage. But we worked on it in such a way that some of it is real and some not.

‘This is so that when the audience watches it they feel it is not glamorised; it’s really horrible.”

While some people have struggled to watch these scenes, Grootboom is frustrated and wonders if he has failed when audiences laugh at the violence. ‘The white audiences are shocked by the violence, but the black audiences are shocked about the vulgar language and explicit sex,” he says.

The 30-year-old grew up in Meadowlands, Soweto, where he says he had a ‘horrible” childhood. ‘When I write about any kind of pain, I always draw on what happened,” he says.

He read Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens. At 16 he saw his first movie and was blown away, sneaking out of school early to ogle the silver screen. His first celluloid hero was Steven Segal — but this embarrasses him now, and he prefers to cite Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Federico Fellini and Paul Thomas Anderson.

Grootboom’s love of film explains the cinematic quality of his plays, which could be described as ‘tabloid theatre”. He likes the broad emotional journeys of film, as opposed to the intellectual appeal of the traditional stage-play.

This, coupled with his unashamed incorporation of American influences — he uses a recorded sound-track, with music by Norah Jones, Sting, R Kelly and Tracy Chapman — seems to be drawing new audiences to the theatre. While the State Theatre is struggling to sell tickets, Relativity‘s opening night was packed and largely black.

Last year, Cards had to close early at the State Theatre because of the poor turnout. It did well at the Market Theatre, however, where it pulled largely white audiences.

It is curious that Grootboom’s subject matter is attracting audiences when South African society has an abundance of real-life nastiness. Even Lara Foot Newton’s Tshepang, dealing with baby rape, drew crowds.

Perhaps it’s just that people like to see themselves reflected in art — and the black comedy underpinning Grootboom’s gruesomeness does make it more palatable. As the serial killer suggests near the end of the play: what is bad all depends on where you are standing. It’s all relative.