Director Brett Bailey’s Orfeus is in many ways a departure from previous works he has staged at the National Arts Festival, the “plays of miracle and wonder” such as Ipi Zombi? and The Prophet.
Bailey is familiar to festival audiences for incorporating ceremony and sacrament within his productions. These works were aggressive — about fire, blood and bone. He broke down our defences with drums, screams, knives and broken glass.
One left his theatre charged up by the adrenalin of the experience, renewed through catharsis, liberated by the irrational. And although his work has always been groundbreaking, the plays were classic in structure with a dramatic plot that built towards an apocalyptic climax.
In Orfeus, Bailey searches out softer tissue, our vulnerabilities, the marrow in our bones, the chasms in our souls. He uses not our fears, but our sympathies for the blind, the forgotten, the broken and the voiceless to torture us.
Bailey’s success is his ability to make even the most jaundiced of theatre-goers reaffirm their belief in the ancient ritual of theatre. Like his medEia, this is a site-specific work. The audience, made to walk in silence for at least 10 minutes before the production, find themselves given over to the realm of the imagination.
Staged in an old quarry, we engage with nature and the beauty of the landscape — the craggy face of the surrounding cliffs, the trees outlined against the rock look like fossil ferns, and two giant eagle owls — perfectly choreographed — swoop over us, one with a dead mouse hanging from its beak.
Bailey has reworked his original production staged at Spier in the Western Cape last year. He has stripped away the speaking parts and the dramatic monologues. Instead, Jane Rademeyer reads us the story from a music stand. Seated in a ritual circle, surrounding a fire, it is remarkable how much more effective this is than character acting. We respond directly to the myth and the archetype of the story. I have never experienced storytelling as successful as this. The words act like subtitles as we watch the story play out before us.
Bailey has universalised his themes this time. There are references to Africa, but this is far away from an African version of the myth. There is no tin-pot African dictator king as in the Spier version.
Orfeus (Bebe Lueki), with gold paint streaking his face, dressed in white broderie anglaise, has a messianic quality. He plays the guitar softly, melodic, singing gently in Lingala. An audience member starts to twist and turn, apparently possessed. She emerges as Eurydice, stripping of her clothes until she, too, is in pure white.
The music builds, but not the mad drumming of Bailey’s iMumbo Jumbo; this is song-ful, harmonious, yet as stirring.
Bailey’s other achievement is the succession of different sensory textures we experience. There are scents and smells of herbs, a mix of natural and stage lighting, sounds of real birds and recorded birdsong. We trample in mud; we climb over stones. Everything we experience has been textured, the landscape reworked.
We are led on a journey through Hades. Bailey has created several installations to represent hell. James Webb’s hidden soundscapes hum and drone. At the gates to the underworld, we are met by a grotesque stench of actual rotting flesh, and huge bones, femurs, litter the ground. Black smoke from burning tyres fills the air.
The installations are deeply upsetting. The Forgotten Man (John Cartwright), emaciated, dressed in a loincloth, stands in an icy cold pool of water among giant boulders, empty tins floating around him. A barbed-wire encampment, a sort of laogai, with an electric fence, buzzing threateningly. Small children are seated, chains around their necks, fastened to a metal pole supporting a loudspeaker blaring in constant repetition, a few distorted phrases from one of his Hitler’s rabid speeches. The children are sewing soles on a pile of cheap shoes.
Orfeus appears each time, and sings his haunting, plaintive refrain, “Eurydice! Eurydice … !” A refrain that perseverates in our thoughts long after the play is finished.
The King of the Underworld (played by Nicholas Ellenbogen), wearing a pith helmet and tapping away on a laptop, is the image of the calculating indifference and greed. Around him is the detritus of corruption in the developing world — used syringes litter the floor, behind him boxes of United Nations food aid and four masked sex slaves, like blow-up dolls, tied to chairs. He allows Orfeus to take Eurydice back to earthly paradise.
We return to the storytelling circle with Orfeus. But Eurydice has been lost, for Orfeus looked back. The sense of loss is so strong that numerous members of the audience are in tears at this point. As Rademeyer tells us: “This is a story of falling, down, down, down.”
This time we leave the “theatre” with our senses heightened and reinvigorated, listening to the night-time sounds of the farm, taking in the stars with renewed enthusiasm. Something inside us has been unlocked.
The National Arts Festival ends on July 7. For information, visit www.nafest.co.za