Evaluating the content of the Standard Bank National Arts Festival from year to year is a little like playing ping-pong with God. Last year’s work from the dominant theatres and directors took us on more of an excursion into overseas drama than our own. And just when it seemed that local had become un-lekker, this year we bounced back into the world of our own making, with destiny grasped firmly in both hands.
Historically, the public spectacle of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with the memories it has evoked, is now an integral feature of the national psyche. As a result, two new works on the main stage – The Dead Weight and Ubu and the Truth Commission – directed by Clare Stopford and William Kentridge respectively, integrate these epic proportions of our current affairs. In different forms, they unpick the relationships between history’s victims and its perpetrators, extending two familiar South African genres – the living newspaper and the border story.
While Ubu employs the multi-media collaborative approach of the Handspring Puppet Company, in general the main programme celebrates the autonomy of the playwright. This year our writers may finally be getting the platform they deserve.
Opportunity can bring all sorts of interesting things out of the woodwork, like author of The Dead Weight, London-based expatriate Paul Herzberg, whose work makes an extremely valid contribution, given our country’s circumstances.
Part of the ongoing fascination of this Festival, then, is to experience the new priorities of the premier writers. Anthony Akerman, for example, goes back to boarding school in his Pact Drama production Old Boys, while Liz Meiring and Deon Opperman have synthesised and adapted Sheridan’s works into Die Skandaal, about the upper-class foibles of the Centurion Park set in Pretoria.
Magnet Theatre will do a clown show called I Do Times Twenty-Two, about bad marriage, and this year’s Standard Bank Young Artist Award-winner for drama, Geoffrey Hyland, directs and designs the sumptuous Madame de Sade, by the Japanese lunatic-genius, Mishima.
Looking outwards, Pieter Toerien will present the South African premiere of Oliver Mayer’s Blade to the Heart, while the Baxter will present a programme compiled by the Royal Shakespeare Company, a smattering of the Bard’s works, titled Shakespeare Revue.
If it seems that all of the above make up a recipe for whiteness, then think again. If one does evaluate the white work against the black work (God forbid that you should do that in the new South Africa), one will notice – in content even if not in ratio – a growing equilibrium.
In the indigenous works at any rate, fewer and fewer are blacks and whites playing polar opposites. We’re all just people now. It’s a return to normality that one hopes doesn’t prove too boring. But the redress is necessary, even if only for the record. These days, for example, when people are depicted in jail one needn’t assume they’re national heroes anymore. This may be the case with Duma kaNdlovu’s The Game, a combination of story-telling and song. A Windybrow production, its main attraction is its cast of six women, including Abigail Kubeka, Nomhle Nkonyeni and Baby Cele. Likewise, the North-West Arts Council is doing Homegirls, another all-woman production, this time about showbiz, of all things!
What we’re seeing is black theatre finally abandoning politics in favour of … well, anything that comes up. It’s a laxity and an artistic freedom that can only be termed marvellous.
Perhaps the most marvellous event, from the booking-kit point of view, is Brett Bailey’s iMumbo Jumbo, about the returning of the skull of a beheaded chief to his people. Every year Bailey comes up with another cute epic about something amazing. He’s obsessed with the behaviour that makes up that horrible colonialism -something that probably wouldn’t be forgiven if he didn’t incorporate the B-word. That’s B for Broader Community.
Another collaboration, no less startling, is Spirit of the Lake. While the combination of the talents of Andrew Buckland with Theatre for Africa seems interesting enough, added to this is the exotic presence of actors from Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi. So, this year one need not stray from Grahamstown in order to do a little eco-tourism.
Finally, the most electrifying moment of the Festival will no doubt be the appearance of Steven Berkoff. His plays have been Festival hits, year after year. With his coarse humour and its seamy, tragic edge, he tells the most wonderful tales of fallen masculinity and of fallen artistry.
Berkoff’s One Man, divided into three pieces, will definitely be a spectacular way of spending two hours (as advertised in the booking kit), while the drama of coffee and koeksusters carries on in the Monument, and outside in the cold.
Fringe benefits
Hazel Friedman
Relegated as always to the tail-end of the festival donkey, the Fringe hangs on the edge of non-conformity, lewdness and legitimacy. Usually the best way of judging whether one of these marginalised productions deserves the Fringe label is by checking out the posters. If naked bodies abound, they do. And amid the wild forays into the realms of the orally/anally fixated and battles of the bulges and the blands, there’s sure to be something to fluff out all kinds of feathers.
For drama royalists there’s Raiders of the Scarlet Pimpernel, the eighth in a long line of cult successes by Theatre for Africa’s Nicholas Ellenbogen.
Dark, mystical and haunting may be the terms used to describe both The Intruder – Maurice Maeterlink’s evocative play – and its director, Reza de Wet. And award-winning actress Denise Newman proves that The Trick is to Keep Breathing, as she takes audiences along a rolling journey through that incurable hangover called life in the 1960s and 1970s.
And if you’re into doing it Greek- style, don’t miss Irene Stephanou’s Meze, Mira and Make-up, which explores the excruciating agony of adolescence, origanum and olives. But the complications of being Greek in the RSA are nothing compared with the contradictions of being white and right (wing) in the NSA (New South Africa). White Men Can’t Jump, Greig Coetzee’s brilliant debut piece on the SADF during the dawn of the new dispensation, clinched four major awards and an invitation to perform at New York’s Lincoln Centre.
Among the more hilarious highlights is the young Botswana-based Maru-a-Pula Drama Group’s rendition of Living with Lady Macbeth, in which the Bard’s themes of power and ambition find an echo in the actions of an ordinary teenager.
The Biko Project: Paul Robeson, Malcolm X to Steve Biko has been billed as dramatic recital, meshing the words of poets Amir Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks and Don Mattera with the sounds of Denzil Weale, Hale Smith and Charles Lloyd Junior.
Finally, musical satire meets puppetry in the Losh n’ Horror Show (hailed simultaneously as a tragical-comedy and comical-tragedy.) The strains of Zulu guitar echo those of the Yiddish violin, as Gary Friedman, Geoff Sifrin and Irene Stephanou explore the parallels between two very different families trapped in exile.