Cape Town Races
By Robert Brustein
Recent Theater in South Africa
On my most recent pilgrimage to South Africa,
it appeared obvious that the country's ugly problems remained
in disturbing contrast to its lovely landscape and gracious population.
HIV/Aids (afflicting more than six million people at present)
is by any measure the largest and most contentious issue confronting
South Africa today. Instead of being brought under control by
the new drug advances, the disease is being accelerated by transmission
from mother to infant. The ANC government has been famously sluggish
in making use of medicines currently available to reduce infant
mortality or to arrest the illness in adults. As a result, the
country's chief political satirist, Pieter-Dirk Uys (a.k.a. Evita
Bezuidenhout, the Afrikaner dowager) has made scornful mockery
of President Thabo Mbeki's Aids policies, claiming that they have
killed more blacks than the prior Apartheid regime. Nor has Uys's
involvement with this issue been confined to the safety of the
stage. Paying regular visits to the townships, he has been lecturing
African school kids on the importance of wearing condoms, a more
appealing item to them when colored black, he suggests in his
splendid new show, Foreign Aids. ("Man, this is so pretty,
I'd wear it on the outside.")
Following close upon the obscenity of Aids
is the unholy trinity of poverty, crime, and unemployment. The
shacks that began to proliferate near the Cape Town airport some
years ago now stretch as far as Somerset West, thirty miles to
the east along the N2 highway, virtually comprising a city of
their own. And black-on-white assaults, rapes, and burglaries
have replaced the white-on-black oppression of the Apartheid years,
though crime at least in the Western Cape appears to have dropped
considerably this year (the ANC government still refuses to publish
actual crime statistics).
Yet, the South African economy is getting
stronger. Real estate prices are going through the roof. Tourism
is growing exponentially. Restaurants and public arenas are now
entirely integrated. Interracial marriages and adoptions are common.
And although black-equity ownership remains at only 3% after ten
years of political liberation, white businesses increasingly include
some form of black partnership or black managerial representation.
South Africa today is a relative model of racial harmony, not
surprising after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings
demonstrated that unheard-of thing, a governing process founded
on Christian principles of forgiveness and atonement.
Still, the disparity between the richest
and the poorest black people is even wider today than that between
blacks and whites in the past. The issue of racial inequality
has clearly not been truly addressed. Visual proof of this income
gap is embedded in the architecture. The living accommodations
of South Africa's predominant races remind one of the way the
Three Little Pigs built their homes to resist the huffing and
puffing of the Big Bad Wolf. The black underclass lives in corrugated
shanties (straw), the lower middle-class coloreds--created by
intermarriage between European settlers and the native Bantu or
Hottentot population--in neat stucco cottages (wood), and the
privileged whites in Cape Dutch mansions and seaside villas (brick).
The greatest fear at the moment is that Thabo Mbeki will be replaced
by some Big Bad Wolf (resembling Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe) who,
in the act of seizing white property, will blow the brick houses
down.
Today, South African theatre is largely
preoccupied with questions of racial identity, just as under Apartheid
it was concerned with questions of racial oppression. But unlike
our own theatre, where such subjects are usually steeped in resentment,
victimization, or liberal guilt, on issues of color differences
the South African stage is remarkably honest and goodnatured.
Take Say Cheese With Marc Lottering,
currently playing at the Baxter Theatre on the grounds of the
University of Cape Town. Lottering is a colored (or mixed race)
satirist in his mid-thirties, performing monologues in the tradition
of a late-night comedian. Speaking mostly in English, but partly
in his native Afrikaans, he enjoys his own wit as much as does
his largely colored middle-class audience who treat him almost
like a family member. Jigging on stage from one end to the other
in a large black Afro with a spot of grey, he has the grace and
nimbleness of a younger Michael Jackson. Like Jackson, he has
had his problems with the law. A few days before I saw his show,
Lottering was arrested for drunken driving in an accident involving
three cars.
Instead of expressing defensive outrage
or fake remorse about this charge, Lottering goodnaturedly incorporated
it into his monologue. Making a barefoot entrance holding the
steering wheel of a car, he jumped into the audience with a broad
smile on his face, shook a number of hands, and, after remarking
"Don't know how your January kicked off--mine began with a big
bang," added "I'm going to need a lift home." Everybody was prepared
to give him one. He's an enormously popular and likeable figure,
even though the primary subject of his satire is the upwardly
mobile pretensions of his own people in their eagerness to imitate
the whites.
Lottering's medium in this piece is a Kodak
carousel which he uses to project "say cheese" moments of his
youth in Cape Flats. There are fading kodachrome slides of his
family who always like to be photographed holding onto tree branches
or leaning on somebody else's car. There are shots of his Khoikhoi
(Bushmen) ancestors: "Absolute rubbish, we're German." And there
are numerous photographs of a colored wedding, with its pregnant
bride and its obligatory table of white people ("they get their
food first"), where the alcoholics always manage to find each
other, and where the flower girl ("this little bitch from hell")
is determined to screw up the whole affair. Lottering concludes
with pictures of a funeral, featuring the customary howlers and
screamers ("Why? Why? Why? Take me! Take me"), before sending
us on our way with the warning, "Whatever you do--do not drink
and drive!"
The Maynardville Open-Air Theatre, now
staging Macbeth, reminded me a lot of the New York Shakespeare
Festival. For one thing, it started performing outdoor Shakespeare
in the fifties, the same decade that Joe Papp founded Shakespeare
in Central Park. For another, its company is completely multiracial.
But whereas the New York Shakespeare Festival actors usually managed
to blend into a unified ensemble, this South African company appeared
to be as tribal as the country itself, including a few members
to whom English is not a native language.
Macbeth was played by Kurt Wurstman, an
apparently British-trained actor with a sandpaper voice who not
only chewed the scenery, but swallowed, digested, and excreted
it. Lady Macbeth was in the hands of a thin neurasthenic Anglo
named Claire Watling who unwittingly demonstrated that the character
was less in need of a crown than a shrink. As for King Duncan,
he was enacted by a dignified Xhosa native (Joko Scott) with an
accent thicker than that of Nelson Mandela (his son Malcolm was
a handsome colored lad named David Johnson). Macbeth's servant
Seton (Duminsane-Sizwe Mbebe) appeared to be a Zulu. And the numerous
thanes, attendants, and murderers, representing virtually all
the racial groups in the country, used such a great variety of
dialects that it was hard to believe these characters inhabited
the same hemisphere, much less the same play.
This approach had its charms but it created
a sense of considerable geographical displacement, further enhanced
by the fact that all the Scottish thanes wore native-American
Mohawk haircuts. As for the weird sisters, those "black and midnight
hags," they were embodied by a chanting tribal trio of men, joined
by four athletic witch boys. With the witches stirring their cauldron,
and the witch boys hanging from the rafters like bats, writhing
to the rhythms of Tony Madikane's jungle tomtoms, the only element
that seemed to be missing was T. S. Eliot's "nice little, white
little, missionary stew".
The actors playing Banquo (Mark Eiderkin)
and Macduff (Milton Schorr) had some tender moments of paternal
love and grief. But Macduff's two boys were such hyperactive brats
that one almost cheered when they were dispatched by Macbeth's
assassins. Lady Macduff was pregnant at the time of her murder,
and so for some reason was Lady Macbeth when she appeared for
her nightly sleepwalk. Perhaps the director (Geoffrey Hyland)
was trying to make some comment on third-trimester abortion. The
portly actress playing Lady Macduff also doubled as a Messenger
and as the drunken Porter, playing the one with uncontrollable
giggles, and the other with such determined scatalogy (wiggling
her behind, bouncing her boobs, squatting on stage to urinate)
that one didn't mind when her Lady Macduff was taken off either,
pregnant or not. There were some lovely lighting effects, especially
on the baobab trees, and the balmy breezes wafting through the
park made it a sensual pleasure to be there. But this Macbeth
was more a culturally unifying experience than an aesthetically
satisfying one.
The major acting problem was Wurstling's
compulsion to croak and glower throughout the evening, apparently
in an effort to indicate the baleful nature of his character.
But Macbeth doesn't begin as a murderous villain. He is a natural
man who becomes habituated to unnatural acts, an essentially decent
apple into which evil eats like a worm. If the actor seemed unable
to understand this process, I imagined, it was because his essentially
benevolent nation doesn't provide many models of malevolent leaders
(I don't count the inevitable financial corruption). That's why
it was interesting to compare South African theatre today with
that of a time when the country lived under a really brutal regime.
I'm referring to a particular play of the
Apartheid period, namely Paul Slabolepszy's Saturday Night
at the Palace, written in 1982 and recently revived at the
Baxter. The title suggests a musical, but the piece is actually
a hard-hitting drama, in the tradition of Athol Fugard's Master
Harold and the Boys, about the humiliation of a black man
by a representative of the ruling white race.
The
play also shows the influence of American realism, especially
in the character of Vince (Neil Sandilands), a brutal redneck
in leather jacket and tee shirt who, in the way he instantly segues
from calm to rage, reminds one of all those inarticulate movie
heroes of the fifties, Ben Gazzara, James Dean, Marlon Brando
in The Wild One (his milder friend Hendrik, played by
Grant Swanby, rides the obligatory motorbike). The action takes
place in front of Rocco's Burger Palace, a fast food joint off
the highway, supervised by a Zulu "bossboy" named September (Sizwe
Msutu).
The volatile Vince, who dreams of being
a football star, has recently lost his job and been kicked out
of his digs. These and other frustrations, especially a sense
of being on the bottom of the social ladder in a country based
on white supremacy ("My old man told me not to let a kaffir get
the better of you.... They're taking over our jobs"), eventually
compels him to goad and insult September in a manner that robs
him of his dignity.
First, he expropriates the keys of the
shop, demanding to be served a meal before he returns them. Then
after September goes after him with his tribal staff, he handcuffs
the black man to Hendrik's motor bike, smashes his windows and
steals his cashbox. Other humiliations follow, including tearing
up September's family photos and smearing food over his face.
All this while Hendrik has been trying to moderate Vince's behavior
towards the black man. But after the two friends start fighting
over a girl and Hendrik knifes Vince, he is instantly ready to
blame the killing on the hapless September.
While it shows its age a bit, the play
retains a lot of punch and even some prophetic power. And it is
strongly directed by Bobby Heaney, and exceedingly well-acted
by the three protagonists, especially Sandilands in the pivotal
role of Vince. That plays such as Saturday Night at the Palace
could have been produced in 1982, with a mixed cast, suggests
not that the Apartheid regime was more tolerant than has been
assumed, but that it didn't count the theatre as very important.
Unlike the popular sports arena, from which blacks were strictly
excluded, an occasional African on stage was not considered much
of a threat to white supremacy. Yet, it was plays of this kind
that helped to change the regime and bring about the impressively
integrated theatre that South Africa enjoys today.
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