When I wrote Tsepo Wa Mamatu’s profile for the 300 Young South Africans supplement, I began by quoting the verse: ‘Poetry makes nothing happen,†a line written by WH Auden in his tribute to WB Yeats.
It’s a line that comes to me again after watching Mbeki and other Nitemares, Wa Mamatu’s new production that premiered at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.
In an interview with Cue, the festival newspaper, the young director said he is a big fan of the former president. ‘I love Mbeki so much that I’m critical of him. I think that Mbeki was in the best position to take the country forward but somewhere we lost the plot somehow. I don’t believe in a lot of things he did and I think he should be held accountable for it.â€
His pain and fears are shared by middle class South Africa. ‘I think we counted our freedom before it hatched and theatre is about posing those difficult political questions, so that we don’t get another [Jacob] Zuma or Julius Malema,†he told the festival newspaper.
Mbeki and other Nitemares is the result of this angst — a tragic take on the fall of the republic’s second president. As writer and director, there are pitfalls to his approach. Mbeki is becoming a minority — I mean Mbeki the idea and Mbeki as a political force — as the unravelling in the breakaway Congress of the People seems to suggest. I can imagine the reaction from Zuma’s backers to this play. That’s to be expected when a writer takes a position, refusing the shelter and succour afforded by false neutrality.
The second pitfall comes from the fact that he wrote the script. Undoubtedly he’s a fine writer, his poetic lines are well-crafted and beautifully executed. It works amazingly well when Mbeki is speaking.
We know of Mbeki’s verbal flourish and his facility with European literature. The problem arises when almost everyone in the production speaks like Mbeki. It seemed to me that his mother, his wife, those who support him and even the multitudes that oppose him use language quite beautifully.
Wa Mamatu could have used a Shakespearean device, if my memory isn’t deceiving me, of having ‘commoners†speak prosaically and limiting poetic turns of phrase to the Hamlets and other royals.
I also felt that somewhere the drama that attended the fall of Mbeki seemed to be underplayed. These problems aside, I felt that Mbeki’s soliloquies were moving, achieving a plaintive tone befitting a tragic figure.
Mbeki is played by Tefo Paya and in many ways he reminds me of other tragic Shakespearean heroes. That is achieved, in part, by Paya’s stoic refusal to believe that the ground on which he is standing has been opened up by massive tectonic shifts, that it’s now riven by earthquakes and is spewing out hot volcanic lava. Wa Mamatu ‘s writing also contributed to the tragic tones that permeated the Mbeki character.
Mbeki and other Nitemares is a brave production that seems to ask why Kwame Nkrumah, Robert Mugabe, Mbeki — stars shining bright in our firmament — burn out and never fulfill the promises they showed earlier on. Perhaps if our theatre continues to ask these difficult political questions we might yet prove Auden wrong. Our art might make something happen.