The spirit of Barney Simon hovers over the space in the Market Theatre Complex that bears his name as four actresses and a director evoke his memory with a series of reminiscences about the man and extracts from his workshopped plays, in Barney’s Women.
Director Fiona Ramsay has assembled a varied cast, one of whom (Nirupa Hurley) never worked with Simon; one (Harriet Manamela) who remembers the famous Simon exercise involving a lengthy study of an orange, but who confesses that she could not understand the shock with which his death was greeted; and one (Phillippa de Villiers-Venter) whose memories include the fact that Simon “introduced me to the Home of the Chicken Pie, movies by John Cassavetes, and the pleasures of pet ownership”.
The fourth is veteran Vanessa Cooke, today custodian of Simon’s dream of a laboratory at the Market for the nurturing of young actors. She is the most significant of all Simon’s theatrical women – the programme lists no fewer than 17 of his productions in which she featured.
The recorded voice of John Oakley-Smith performing his and Simon’s Rough and Tumble Days from Storytime led to the expectation of an evening of pleasant nostalgia.
Regrettably, the promise was not always fulfilled; performances were uneven and some of the material has not worn well.
The items that suffered most were both musical – Manamela’s version of Mackay Davashe and Simon’s moving Madam Please from Phiri, the musical township take on Ben Jonson’s Volpone, and Oakley-Smith’s Lady from the Odeon, which Hurley simply could not carry off. And, sad to say, Cooke’s Miss South Africa (6), once a glorious tour de force, should have been left to memory.
Highlights of the evening were De Villiers-Venter’s beautifully evoked I Decided I Was Pregnant from People, the three extracts from Cincinatti, Manamela’s gripping Nomaza from Black Dog/Inj’enyama and Cooke’s heartrending Gwen, from Outers.
Curiously, the most dated piece in a collection that evoked the lost world of Springbok Radio and Hillbrow’s heyday came from the character of Mia (Hurley), the civil rights lawyer in the once seminal Born in the RSA spawned in the 1980s as South Africa burned.
While familiarity with the works of Simon certainly doesn’t breed contempt, it does breed a certain expectation, and it is hard to know just how much of my sense of discontent was provoked by rosy remembrance. I write from the perspective of one who was there from those Dorkay House days of the 1970s and it is possible that a generation coming fresh to the material might feel differently, for indeed, in many ways, Simon was prescient.