“The best war films are the ones that focus on what happens to the soldier who has returned from the war,” says Greig Coetzee, acclaimed writer, director and actor whose recent work Johnny Boskak Is Feeling Funny reaped a Fringe First Award at this year’s Edinburgh Festival. “That’s why Taxi Driver is the best film made about Vietnam, even though you never catch a glimpse of Vietnam throughout the movie,” he says.
In this respect Johnny Boskak shares many parallels with Martin Scorsese’s epic tale of a Vietnam veteran’s chilling descent into madness and murder. Coetzee’s character is one of the original military misfits from the playwright’s international hit White Men with Weapons. Now, 20 years later, Boskak is disenchanted, disillusioned, alienated and unemployed. A self-described “white-trash apartheid abomination”, unable to come to terms with life as a shiftless bum in a country ruled by people he was once trained to kill.
Two decades after leaving the killing fields of his own “Nam” (Namibia), Boskak emerges from the shadows of history to wreak havoc in Coetzee’s stunningly original “low-budget road movie for the stage”- with a script written and delivered in furiously paced rhyming couplets from a collapsed cauldron of English, Afrikaans, Zulu and South African slang.
The work is a hugely entertaining triumph of tragicomedy as Boskak — who claims “I’ve met the Devil and I’ve met the Lord and they’re both driving cars you and I can’t afford” — hooks up with Eve, a “bubble-gum, lip-gloss, double-come, kick-arse, troublesome angel” for a spree of self-destructive chaos.
Johnny Boskak Is Feeling Funny is at the Hilton Arts Festival from September 15 to 17, where Coetzee’s presence is felt in another stage highlight, Blood Orange.
The work is an adaptation of the novel by South African-born Troy Blacklaws. The one-hander stars Craig Morris as Gecko, a boy whose extremely eccentric and lopsided view of the world unfolds as an eerie coming-of-age tale that mixes existentialism and magic realism with remarkable results. From his idyllic boyhood in the green hills of KwaZulu-Natal to the unforgiving battlegrounds of his schooling in the Cape, Gecko witnesses curious incidents involving James Dean and Wilbur Smith, while evolving a unique take on history beginning with man landing on the moon and ending with Mandela riding a mermaid to freedom.
In a strange twist of fate, Coetzee’s involvement in the 2006 Hilton Arts Festival doesn’t end there — in 1995, during his last year as a teacher at Pietermaritzburg Girls’ High, Coetzee and Helen Vermaak workshopped the South African reconciliation musical Bambelela Sisajike (Hold Tight, We’re Still Turning), which the school has resurrected and updated for a performance at this year’s event.
The Hilton Arts Festival runs from September 15 to 17. For a full programme visit www.artslink.co.za/hilton