/ 30 September 2011

Tidying up the mess

Tidying Up The Mess

The play I am opening this week is called Sailing Somewhere. It’s a play with music, not a musical — it’s only got five songs. It is written by a South African writer called Matthew Hurt — he’s living in London. The music is by a young Irish composer called Conor Mitchell.

Hurt, I think, has drawn on the experience of his mother who was a dancer, although he doesn’t say it is autobiographical. The character I play is a lounge singer on a ship.

It’s essentially a South African piece; it embraces what a lot of South African performers have to do — performing on ships. It embraces the fact of being an entertainer in a no-man’s-land. The play is about being caught in limbo between one destination and another. The character is just sort of living it — not having to commit to anything. I suppose it’s an allegory for the cultural landscape she finds herself in, not really being embraced by any specific culture.

I have always been interested in cabaret. As a medium I enjoy it because you can do so much with it. The music can provide an emotional resonance, something that you cannot do with mere words.

Of the world-famous cabaret stars I think Ute Lemper is amazing; then there’s Marlene Dietrich and Marianne Faithfull. I have all of her albums. In a way my new show was born out of a previous Marianne Faithfull tribute show I created with Vanessa Cooke. We wanted to do something similar, but that show had all the Rolling Stones hits in it and the economic climate prohibits that scale of production.

These kinds of cabaret works make a comment on the world, and they have to be slightly depressing to make that comment. The songs for the new show are not completely depressing; they just expose the character’s inner life. They are ironic and funny really. It’s dark humour and I am drawn to the darker side of life.

At the moment I’m reading Umberto Ecco’s On Beauty, which is really about aesthetics. But I am also reading the catalogue, Tretchikoff: The People’s Painter. I tend to read two or three books at once. I am doing my MA in vocal pedagogy through Wits University, so I read about that.

I quite liked the Steig Larsson trilogy. I thought the film adaptations were good but the bleakness of the books was not there.

I’m reading Killing Kebble and it is making me terrified of what is lurking in every coffee bar and in every club you know, or used to frequent. In effect, it has made me more cautious about going out; one is certainly less gung-ho about throwing caution to the wind.

But I do go out two or three times a week. I need that stimulation. I need to see what’s going on around me, whether it’s to the opening of a gallery or to the art fair, or to a play or to the ballet. I went to the FNB Jo’burg Art Fair last weekend and I found the photography amazing. There was a beautiful image of a high-rise block of flats in Hillbrow, or Braamfontein.

I see that sort of image today and I feel like an outsider because I live in suburbia. But it resonates somewhere in my past because, when we were younger, Hillbrow was such a part of my life.

I watch a lot of American television. I am watching Madmen at the moment and it is incredible. The grittiness of it is something I miss. There is nothing like it in our television landscape and I miss the drama — it’s all soap. It is such an empty gap for us. There is no work that encapsulates or investigates one area of life.

In the theatre, lately, I have enjoyed Mark Hawkins’s Hotel, currently showing at the Market Theatre. It is a dance piece that uses dramatic licence. It has a rawness about it. It explores the mess of it all. It explores the untidiness of city living. Yet I have become a person who needs to tidy it all up. I’d love to not be, but I’m afraid I am.

Sailing Somewhere
runs at the Theatre on the Square, Nelson Mandela Square, Sandton, from October 4 to 29. To book, phone: 011 883 8606.