I’m convinced that Cape Town has the most transparent theatres in the country. Not because they would tell you how they select their shows or what they’re paying their actors (getting this information is still as hard as an away-from-home judge in a Mumbai hotel), but because the city with the foulest weather also has the largest number of open-air theatres.
If ever the drought that reigns in other parts of the country extends its dominion to Cape Town, the locals should schedule an opening night at Maynardville. It’s bound to rain. Just like if there’s ever a water shortage in Durban, they should play a one-day cricket international and before you can say ‘Duckworth/Lewis”, it will rain like Nigerian goals on the self-styled Banana Banana Republic.
Maynardville was lucky this year. An excellent production of Macbeth opened on a night where the only drops were the vowels and meanings as some actors struggled to convey Shakespeare’s text.
One could almost hear the disparaging thoughts of the audience. Quota actors. It’s a classic contemporary South African theatre conundrum. Public funds are generally needed to stage productions with large casts required by Shakespeare.
There is pressure to include black actors in exchange for these public funds. But the funds are not enough to provide the extended rehearsal time needed for voice coaching that some of the black actors require to improve their technical skills in not only their second or third language, but in the poetic and 17th-century version of it.
Yet if the stunning, primarily black Cape Town Opera chorus can sing German, French and Italian to local and international acclaim, there is no reason why black actors cannot be trained to speak ‘Shakespeare”.
Perhaps, one day, the roles will be reversed when the Maynardville producers stage Umabatha and the amalungu actors will have to sing and speak in Zulu.
There are no such politically correct pressures at the intimate Oude Libertas amphitheatre, with its excellent and diverse programming funded by the Distell wine company. Veteran and multiple-award-winning director Marthinus Basson has the freedom to put together a cast of his choice for a production of the Argentinian opera, Maria de Buenos Aires.
Co-funding for the production from other ‘Afrikaans” festivals such as Klein Karoo and Aardklop (and with a contribution from the National Arts Festival in Grahamsstown) allows Basson to provide employment for numerous Afrikaans-speakingperformers,many of whom may not bother with Maynardville auditions or would struggle to obtain funds from the current National Arts Council for work in their language.
Maria de Buenos Aires was sung in Spanish, with the audience having to follow in Afrikaans subtitles projected above the simultaneous, multi- disciplinary dance/theatre/opera/ music action and visuals on stage. Ironically, though, despite the freedom of (relatively) independent funding that did not require it to genuflect in any politically correct direction, the opening night of Maria under the beautiful Stellenbosch sky, and with its solitary ‘person of colour”, left one feeling less satisfied with the artistic whole than the opening night of Macbeth, for all the supposed shortcomings arising from the latter’s politically correct casting.
A short distance from the Oude Liebertas is the new-money Spier amphitheatre, with its old-style arts patron, Dick Enthoven. (In the winelands, every Dick, Tom and Paul Cluver seems to have their own amphitheatre.)
No PC pressures in evidence, no chauvinistic cultural enclave, just a happy-clappy, privately funded (with a little help from the Lotto) celebration of the status quo — with the best purchases on offer in the New South African arts hypermarket: from Sibongile Khumalo, William Kentridge and Vusi Mahlasela to Judith Sephuma, Brett Bailey and Pieter-Dirk Uys.
And oh, in among these local icons, there’s the odd neo-colonial product created by leftovers of the British Empire who mine and appropriate local talent for worldwide export and self-acclaim. But this, I suppose, is the prerogative of independent wealth. The storytellers on the stages may hold us enraptured, but just as fascinating are the new South African stories told by the theatres themselves.