Theatre director Yael Farber has a deceptively diminutive stature that serves to reinforce, rather than belie, her passion and intensity.
‘Johannesburg is a very intense city to live in. It’s hardcore and inspiring,” she says of the city where she grew up and received her theatre education. ‘Although I do not come from a theatre family, there was no alternative.”
She has used her rigorous approach to create theatre that grips, shocks and provokes, such as when she made Shopping and Fucking. ‘That was a powerful experience, the turning point of my career,” she says of the 1997 shocker. For her, Mark Ravenhill’s work about Britain’s troubled Ecstasy generation ‘showed what I wanted to do. It made me realise that I can tell interesting stories.” For this read: interesting local stories.
Her dream of putting Johannesburg’s intensity on stage took a while to materialise. After Shopping she had a stint in Manhattan directing Athol Fugard’s Hello And Goodbye. Not surprisingly, she also finds New York ‘intense in a different way, and artists are valued there”. While in New York she teamed up with veteran actress Thembi Mtshali to workshop A Woman In Waiting.
Now she has assembled a stellar cast and resurrected the Bard in an Afrocentric incarnation to tell the story of Julius Caesar set in Azania with SeZar. ‘I wanted to make the work to be engaging, I wanted everything, whether it’s beauty or violence, to be extreme”. At every turn the work is infused with intensity. It comes in the form of the skilfully woven use of Tswana and Zulu, using Sol Plaatjie’s Tswana translation Dintshontsho Tsa Kesari as a template. Intensity also comes from the music, fusing Aboriginal melodies, sombre and melancholic strains to create a mood so eerie it does not allow for an interval. Intensity is also sustained by Siyabonga Twala’s choreography, reminiscent of his moves in Siyavuma!, and executed here with Tony Kgorogoe.
The big-name cast lives up to its reputation. Twala, Kgorogoe and Tumisho Masha are all familiar from Isidingo and are joined by another star form the soapie, Keketso Semoko. From the set of Yizo Yizo 2 come Mabatho Mogotsi as the magnificently manipulative Porshia, and Menzi Ngubane, who consolidates his reputation as a mean, rogue character player with a sometimes heavily exerted portrayal of Brutas.
Masha and Twala’s repertoire of works are impressively vast. They have immersed themselves in pantomime with Janice Honeyman’s Turkish Delight, rasping comedy with Deep in the Coca LaLa and Chikin Biznis, respectively. Now Masha renews acquaintances with the long dead but imposing writer, having first encountered him at Wits drama school, while Twala shows Shakespeare how to dance.
Mary Twala shows you are never too old to learn by engaging Shakespeare after three decades of acting. The subtle genius in casting lies in the fact that the director and producers were not tempted to give any of the high-profile actors the role of Julius Ceaser to entice the television-numbed audience. Instead the part goes to the relatively unexposed Sprinter Segobela, who pulls it off with spiritual evocation and aplomb. His performance has been heavily influenced by his work with Sello Galane and adult contemporary outfit Medu.
For the female characters, the fact they are pushed to the periphery after Caesar’s death is a tragic flaw of a 400-year-old script. In fact, not since 1997, when the cast of Duma ka Ndlovu’s The Game won a Vita award for best actresses, has an ensemble presented such a compelling case for collective recognition.
The haunting magnetism of Johannesburg ironically made its debut last year in the sleepy town of Grahamstown at the event that brings the university town to life, the National Arts Festival, which commissioned the work.
On the festival’s future, Farber stresses, ‘All I keep thinking is that it should not close down. If it was not for the festival, this play would be an idea in my head.”
The work also shook another university town, Oxford, which has arguably the highest concentration of people who regard the Bard as sacrosanct, and, according to Farber, vegetarians who they must have offended with their use of an image of SeZar clutching a lump of meat for the play’s poster.
‘I wanted Oxford to engage in our reality,” says Farber. The town obliged, with full houses and standing ovations for 10 days, ensuring that the short season was a success. That led to a two-month tour of the United Kingdom being organised for later this year. For the next month though, SeZar will be in the city that gave birth to it.
SeZar is at the African Bank Market Theatre’s main theatre until March 9. Tickets cost R28,50 on Sundays and Tuesdays, R39 on Wednesdays and Thursdays and R50 on Fridays and Saturdays. All shows start at 8pm.Bookings at Computicket. Enquiries at (011) 832 1641.