SANTA GAMKA. Written by Eben Venter. Adapted by Marlo Minnaar. Directed by Jaco Bouwer, with Marlo Minnaar. Music by Ulrich ‘Namasun’ Roberts. At The Baxter Theatre Centre until Friday. TRACEY SAUNDERS reviews
THERE has been many a developmental report with the trite title “Paths out of Poverty”, which embody the notion that one simply has to make the correct choice and walk in the right direction to walk away from poverty. This is a piece that belies that misconception and throws the stark choices that poverty extracts into harsh relief.
Santa Gamka is a small dry town in the Karoo. It’s hot. Very hot. If you live under a corrugated iron roof it’s even hotter. Climb into a kiln and the heat is deadly. Lucky Marais is a young man who wants to escape Santa Gamka, the dry heat, the grinding poverty. Primarily the heat as he literally feels his life flashing before his eyes. This is a small town that holds many secrets and keeping them demands a high price from those least able to pay.
While he has been condemned to hell so many times, his imminent fiery end doesn’t come as a surprise, the play presents a series of flashbacks which show the path that has brought him to this point.
It is the place as much as the people that is a character in the play. Santa Gamka, like many local towns has a wealthy, predominantly white area and a poorer, primarily black community. He yearns for the “full freezers “ and “full bloom roses” of the Bodorp from his vantage point in the Onderdorp. From the moment of his birth, to a mother desperate for her child not to be born with FAS, his dire circumstances are evident. Born into a poverty that sinks in to your skin through generations, as slippery and as essential as the afterbirth it seems relentless and inescapable. He relays a chilling encounter in the girl’s bathroom at school which epitomises the ravages of poverty, the “somtotaal van armgeid” as he sees it. It is a brief moment in the play, but one that draws attention to the different consequences of sexual intercourse for girls and boys. The terms of Lucky’s sexual debut are dubious and provide a striking example of the terms of consent. His subsequent sexual encounters are negotiated and while he would appear to be the aggressor, the power deferential only serves to highlight his vulnerability.
The sexual scenes are not avoided and the stylised depiction is realistic enough to be harrowing, but not offensive.
Minnaar first encountered Lucky Marais when he read the book by Eben Venter. Perhaps it is because his first engagement with the mercurial young man was through a medium which creates an immediate relationship between oneself and a character that he has slipped so easily in to Lucky’s skin.
Lucky himself forms a relationship with literature that provides him with another view of the world. An unconventional friendship with his teacher, Mr D’Oliviera, leads to his admiration for Shakespeare and Auden and the discovery of Catcher in the Rye. His hours spent reading fuel his dreams and heighten his realization that “That dreamers often lie. In bed asleep, while they do dream things true.” It is at the feet of his teacher that he learns the finer details of navigating society; not to take four sugars in your coffee, the correct pronunciation of tricky English words and some of the nuances of interpersonal relationships. Armed with this knowledge, physical beauty, charm and a deep desire to change his circumstances Lucky sets out in earnest.
This riveting production portrays the inevitable collision between an ambitious young man and a fractured society which seems hell-bent on stifling even the most nascent of ambitions. You watch him grow up on stage, transforming from an inquisitive little boy to an experimental youth surrounded by poverty and violence so entrenched that they are rendered invisible. His charisma and his looks offer him a way out and soon he has navigated his passage into the Bodorp. But this is South Africa and stepping out of a racially defined hierarchy is not that simple. It wasn’t easy before 1994 because of apartheid and it isn’t any easier now despite a plethora of promises and a raft of legislation.
Just as development can’t be legislated for, neither can the law eradicate hate and it is as thick as the dry Karoo dust in this town. Lucky charms his way through life gaining several admirers and financial benefits on the way. His sexually charged and often humorous encounters with people are largely positive until he entertains Rooiboer’s dark desires. His encounters with the wealthy farm owner are small vignettes of violence that mirror his father’s relationship with his employer and no matter who holds the whip, Lucky remains the victim.
Despite his overbearing presence Rooiboer is never seen on stage. His disembodied voice bellows out of the speakers as his unseen, yet all-seeing presence seems to invade the entire stage. He doesn’t have to be seen to be believed – his prominence in society and his impact on Lucky are both larger than life.
Bouwer’s set is deceptively simple. He has created a world in a town with a few tables, sand and the occasional prop – a tin utility vehicle, a pair of Levi jeans. On the banks of a river, in the cool dark of a farmhouse sitting room, or alongside a road in the searing sun, each site of misery and pleasure is evoked without much fanfare. The stifling heat and a sense of impending disaster are perfectly created by the sounds created by Ulrich ‘Namasun’ Roberts which heighten the tension with a pervasive persistence which doesn’t overwhelm what happens on stage. As Minnaar navigates between the two communities the table becomes a bridge between one life and another. With the use of clever lighting his imminent demise is provocatively recreated with a simple visual illusion and some very creative lighting,
Minnaar has adapted this text with a canny depth of understanding. He inhabits the stage as surely as Lucky inhabits the Karoo and he slips between characters and leaps over the stage with a deftness and Andrew Buckland-like command of physical theatre that is mesmerising. His powerful performance ensures that one feels less of a voyuer and more of a co-conspirator in his bid to escape. The text is beautiful, even though the subject matter is not and it is the combination of both that make this a powerful and gritty performance. Primarily the story of one man it is also the story of a country and a system. It’s not theatre for the faint-hearted, but then life seldom is.
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