From the creative team that brought us Gums and Noses, director Craig Freimond and producer Robbie Thorpe’s new television series, Sorted, features actor Lionel Newton playing himself, and improvisation underpinning the process.
‘It’s an outrageous way of working,” says Freimond. ‘It’s such a different style. There are no sets, no laugh tracks. It’s shot on two cameras, which are always loose with no tripods. There’s no scripted dialogue, so there’s a lot of overlapping and a lot of realness in the way that people speak to each other. They’re not trying to remember lines, they’re just responding to the situation. It’s almost got a documentary feel.”
Drawing inspiration from Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office, Freimond says that ‘a lot of us have worked in comedy before and we’ve got an issue with the way that we represent ourselves in this country — it always feels slightly false. I suspect that this form is a logical step forward out of reality TV.”
Using improvisation and getting actors to play themselves promises to remove the affectedness characteristic of local comedy. Newton plays himself, to an extent. ‘I don’t have a girlfriend. I’m married with two kids. So there’s a me that’s not participating. But I would say that the impulse to any answer or any situation is coming from dead centre. I’m not having to fabricate or go through a process where I’m trying to play someone else. I’m playing situations that I’d never usually get into, but I handle them in the way that I would deal with it if I was in that situation.
‘I think a lot of humour is about stereotypes, taking the piss out of someone — the Porra, the Greek, the Irishman, Van der Merwe — and I think that in South Africa at the moment, we haven’t got to the stage yet where we can laugh at each other, with each other. We’re just not there yet and one understands why. What works about this sort of comedy is that I’m taking the piss out of myself. I am the stereotype,” he says.
Newton, who is best recognised for his physical theatre work with Andrew Buckland and his wife, Lara Foot-Newton, offers a stereotype of himself that is somewhere between Woody Allen, Mr Bean and Charlie Chaplin. He’s billed as a ‘an everyman and a really nice guy, but the universe constantly conspires against him. No deed, whether good or bad, goes unpunished,” says Newton. Although he plays an actor, ‘he’s mostly unemployed because just being himself is a full-time job. His days are just taken up by trying to sort out the shit that he gets himself into,” adds Freimond.
By nature, the medium of improvisation is very talky, requiring that the characters are somewhat more intelligent than the average character of the South African comedy. With high levels of anxiety and neurosis coming through in this word-a-minute barrage, the series offers a lot of questioning of the rules of society. For instance: What are the rules for a handshake, what constitutes sexist behaviour, should you break up with your partner if their voice irritates you?
The show is deliberately not gaggy. ‘It’s more like a slow burn, not laugh-a-minute. The storylines are quite intricate and a lot of the comedy comes from the collective fuck-up,” says Freimond. Newton describes it as playing drama, but tilted slightly to the offbeat.
Some elements of more phsyical comedy do come into many of the episodes, though. But, says Newton, the farce is more of a race against the clock, ‘more kinetic than burlesque”.
Esmeralda Bihl plays Newton’s girlfriend and Sami Sabiti and Andy Kasrils complete the regular characters. More than 60 people make cameo appearances throughout the series, including Bill Flynn, Ed Jordan, Rihaad Moosa, Oscar Petersen, Andrew Buckland, Mmabatho Mogomotsi and Sechaba Morojele.
Freimond, Newton, Thorpe and even the SABC3 are curious and unsure about how it will be received. ‘In a way, it’s going to say a lot about the society we live in: what they find funny, what they don’t; will they find some of it offensive, won’t they; will it create some debate, will it even create debate about comedy? I’ve got a sense that it might take two or three episodes to educate viewers about the style, and only in the fourth episode will they go with it,” says Newton.
‘For some people, it’s going to be ‘What!?’ and for other people, hopefully, it will be really exciting and different,” concludes Freimond.
Sorted airs on SABC3 at 9.30pm on Thursdays