Bringing the essentials of the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown to Johannesburg is the 969 Festival, running in Newtown until July 24. Three of the most topical plays of the National Arts Festival headline the skinny Jozi incarnation — The Travellers, Petra and Hostile Takeover.
The unofficial audience favourite, The Travellers, is a magical, thrilling piece of physical theatre directed by Sylvaine Strike (Black and Blue and Baobabs Don’t Grow Here). There is profound hope that binds the family in The Travellers together. It can’t be an easy task for the highly-strung, shrewd mother (Toni Morkel) to raise the identical twins Iris (Shelley Meskin) and Irwin (Daniel Buckland) — who happen to have eyes only for each other — on a busker’s salary.
A dreamscape is created through the combination of clowning, mime and puppetry. However, while many of the images imply a psychological significance, the piece makes no indications towards a deeper meaning. This does translate into a refreshingly unassuming tone, but it also leaves a desire for some gravity to the frivolous hallucinatory quality of the work.
Not lacking in gravity is PJ Sabbagha’s dance work Petra, which examines relationships and how HIV/Aids has politicised intimacy in a way that is akin to military conscription. A Standard Bank Young Artist award-winner for dance, Sabbagha is recognised for his innovation in terms of presenting dance as a complete theatre experience — lights, design, sound, drama and movement are integrated. He does not disappoint on this level in Petra, a somewhat rough diamond otherwise.
Craig Morris and Athena Mazarakis are the lead dancers. Morris plays a drag queen who is experiencing a failing relationship with a man, played by Dawid Minnaar. He meets a girl, Mazarakis, with whom he falls deeply in love, but they are separated and Morris is sent to the army. Tones of loneliness, social prisons and a dehumanised soul emerge.
Mazarakis and Morris display a scintillating chemistry and ease of intimacy and movement — their talents are perfectly matched. In the power of his leading performers’ duet relationship, Sabbagha’s choreographic hand is at times erased by the Mazarakis-Morris force. They head up a troupe of five other dancers and Sabbagha’s orchestration of the larger ensemble lies to his credit, bar some tightening here and there.
On sound is Jennifer Ferguson live. Dismiss your preconceptions about the red-headed singer-songwriter. Integrating a pitch-perfect, heartfelt voice with low-fi digital beats and loops, Ferguson surprises with an ethereal sound, embodying a space of quietness on the otherwise quite frenzied stage.
The visuals are ruled by Sabbagha’s collaboration with video artist Nathaniel Stern. The result is an aesthetic reminiscent of William Kentridge’s animations. At times, a slow-moving, abstracted texture is projected on the backdrop, contrasting the skittish and emotive dance gestures of the dancers upfront — similar to the way Kentridge’s erase-and-shoot method creates snail trails around his figures. At other times, the dancers’ sequences are projected as they perform, creating an infinite mirror of reflections. The mattresses with various body parts, drawn in a gestural style, also recall Kentridge’s use of piles of paper that sweep across a landscape.
Trailblazing up the N3 to Jozi, offering realism verging on farce, with none of the prettiness of the The Travellers or Petra, is the highly anticipated Hostile Takeover by Mike van Graan. This follows his critically acclaimed Green Man Flashing. Heralded as ushering in a new phase for political theatre in South Africa, Green Man Flashing is a tough act to follow.
Set on a landscape of sand, the play opens with Stanley Green (Martin le Maitre) digging his own grave under duress from a hit man, Nkosi (Lindelani Buthelezi). The intelligent and witty script drives the comic banter between the two characters as Green tries to persuade Nkosi not to kill him. A third character enters, played by Mpho Molepe, but telling would be spoiling.
As Bauke Snyman commented in Wordstock, a National Arts Festival publication, ‘I felt I was at a braai of journalist friends, trapped in a political discussion. And each time I wanted to contribute to the conversation, they were one step ahead.”
There are no concessions to political correctnesses and the play constantly turns the pointed finger of ‘who is the bad guy” around. It speaks of the larger political climate in South Africa and the impact that individuals experience on a personal and moral level, and the degeneration of this.
Hostile Takeover is not as tight as Green Man Flashing. The direction, by Malcolm Purkey, is questionable. While watching a man dig his own grave at gunpoint should be a tense nail-biter, the laugh-a-minute script scatters the sense of discontent. The actors should, perhaps, have been far drier in their delivery. Le Maitre and Buthelezi’s characters need some work; they display an uncanny resemblance to their Hard Copy roles.
Probably only being beaten by talk of whether or not you liked Hamlet — or saw it — and whether Paul Grootboom’s visceral Relativity: Township Stories was the ‘Tarantino of the township” or downright scornful, three of the most significant plays of the National Arts Festival make a quaint caravan up to the gold fields, along with Hoot, The Toilet, Mampatile and Not the Princess.
The works are not flawless, but certainly worth a look — The Travellers for its sheer entertainment factor, and Petra and Hostile Takeover for the manner in which they engage with contemporary issues from fresh perspectives.