Robert Colman’s latest drag performance, Daisy’s Well Hung, takes to the Women’s Jail on Constitution Hill over the next fortnight. It’s something of a homecoming for the murderess Daisy de Melker, who was imprisoned there in 1932 prior to being hanged.
In this two-man show, directed by Vanessa Cooke and Robert Whitehead, Colman plays the one-time nurse whose ghost is said to haunt the old prison where the country’s most credible activists awaited trial. In the Thirties, De Melker’s story became a sordid side dish for a conservative public hungry for scandal. She was accused of poisoning two of her husbands and convicted for murdering her son.
Over the decades, this dour figure has gained colour, and she was turned into a poltergeist of a husband-killing femme fatale. Now, Colman resurrects De Melker in Technicolour as a wannabe chanteuse. She sings demurely, voice loaded with latent pain, while her accompanist — the ‘lovely Harold”, played by composer Philip Miller — tickles the ivories.
The show that began as a ‘South African Chicago” has ended up scaled down and very offbeat, indeed. Imagine Kiss of the Spiderwoman played by a flat-footed Turffontein hausfrau.
Colman’s alternative performance work has been seen over the decades in every major South African theatre. He directed After Nines!, a work about gay community history that played at the Gay Games in Amsterdam in 1998 and at the Sydney Mardi Gras in 2000. Last year he joined choreographer Robyn Orlin’s company on a Swedish tour.
Why tell the story of Daisy de Melker?
Why not? What’s fascinating to me is that she’s been classed as an icon, but really she’s just a common or garden murderess who was hanged in 1932. And, nearly a century later, a lot of people you speak to in South Africa have heard of Daisy de Melker. In the past she was a mythical personality for many. If a door blew shut in the wind they would say ‘it was the ghost of Daisy de Melker”. If a child’s hair was unkempt and wild, they said ‘you look like Daisy de Melker”.
Is the show properly researched or a loosely based impression?
The research on her is scant. There are two photographs: a terrible mugshot that could be anybody and a photograph of her waving to fans outside the courthouse. The way we’ve done the play is to restage Daisy’s lounge act. She’s a glamorous chanteuse, telling her story.
She’s telling her life story, which could well fit her fantasy of herself. She was, like many a great murderess, taking notes for a Hollywood movie script during her trial. That is part of the research that I managed to get. There are also the court transcripts and she’s covered in a couple of books. One is by her defence attorney, HH Morris. There’s not that much beside the court transcripts, which were the main source.
Where did you find the transcripts?
I got them from Constitution Hill; they got them from their research.
Did you get the idea from the exhibition at Constitution Hill about female prisoners who were incarcerated there?
The composer, Philip Miller, got the idea when he collaborated with artist Terry Kurgan for the Three Women exhibition at Constitution Hill. At that stage, Philip said this had to be a play — South Africa’s own Chicago — and so it evolved. At first the idea was to do a full-scale musical. But, ultimately, it came down to a one-man show.
Why didn’t you just write a beautiful part and give it to a good actress to play it for real? What’s the point of playing Daisy de Melker in drag?
This way it is more dangerous, more edgy. It’s definitely a more exciting way to tell a story about a murderess, because it gains an element of black humour. You cannot do a drag show about a serial killer and make it all serious and tragic.
What does this work say, in general, about South African women of that period?
What it says about the period is not necessarily only about South African women. It says that women of that period were so bound by convention and gender roles.
The line I’ve taken with Daisy — besides the fact that she was obviously a manic depressive, psychopathic personality — is that she was also a product of her time. Today, she could have been a boardroom Barbie, getting her kicks from making million-dollar deals. But, in those days, women such as her didn’t work.
Are there any accounts of her hanging?
Not that I’ve found. There is quite a gap in prison research between the mid-1920s and the 1940s.
The capital punishment aspect is quite underplayed.
It is underplayed. I think some people do leave thinking, did she do it? Actually, she took the secret with her to the gallows. She never confessed. In the end, she was only convicted for killing her son. She was found not guilty of poisoning her two husbands, and there were another seven suspected murders being investigated in Rhodesia.
Are you expecting to confront her ghost when you play her in the Women’s Jail?
Well, she is meant to haunt the Women’s Jail. I’m quite convinced that if she does, and her ghost is there, she’ll be very happy with this version of herself.
Daisy’s Well Hung shows at the Temporary Exhibition Space in the Women’s Jail on Constitution Hill, 1 Kotze Street, Hillbrow. Tickets are R150, including a three-course dinner by Gramadoelas. Performances are on September 10, 11, 17 and 18 at 6.30pm for 7pm. For bookings, Tel (011) 381 3100