Steyn du Toit
TO BORROW a phrase from the great playwright Shakespeare, all of Grahamstown is currently a stage, and all the men and women merely players on it as part of this year’s National Arts Festival(NAF) until Sunday.
Delivering a memorable performance, however, is a craft that takes more than just knowing where to stand on stage, memorising your lines and relying on your wit and sparkling personality to shine through. We can’t all be Dylan Moran, after all.
A director who can always be counted on to deliver not only something of intelligence and substance, but also of conceptual brilliance, while drawing out the best (and worst) from his cast members is former Standard Bank Young Artist (SBYA) for Theatre, Jaco Bouwer ( Rooiland, Balbesit).
Apart from being hands-down the best thing I’ve seen at NAF so far, it’s going to be a while before I’ll be able to shake Bouwer and renowned local opera singer Magdalene Minnaar’s Waansin(Madness) from my mind.
Inspired by the various “mad scenes” found in 18th century Bel canto operas – in which a female lead reaches the point where she finally slips over the edge of sanity, the production pays tribute to all these women on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Stepping on to a stage filled with golden faces surfacing from the floor, and with a wild look in her eyes, while blood is seen running down from where she presumably slit her own wrists, Minnaar instantly makes you forget that you are sitting in a theatre.
Dressed completely in black is dancer Henk Opperman ( Bok, Mode), who plays the part of Minnaar’s various characters’ madness. You almost miss him at first, thinking the movement on the floor next to Minnaar’s first character is her shadow. He’s her black dog, her contortionist, her companion, her lover and her enabler. They are soulmates.
Led by renowned pianist Jose Dias, a three-piece ensemble then proceed to accompany these two through various related scenes from well-known operas. They include Donzetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet, as well as Bernstein’s Candide.
Where that small body manages to find all the sounds it produces, I do not know – let alone all the athletics and physical control she’s required to execute simultaneously, but seeing Minnaar so completely consumed by her craft makes for the kind of theatre experience a lowly critic like myself spend most of my time searching for.
On a (relatively) lighter note, among the other productions that explored the darker side of the human condition, over the festival’s first half, were the Tara Notcutt-directed satire, Three Blind Mice, reuniting James Cairns, Albert Pretorius and Rob van Vuuren after 2012’s Three Little Pigs, and Marianne Thamm’s I Have Life – Alison’s Journey. It is based on her book by the same name, which details the harrowing 1994 abduction, rape, torture, disembowelment, and, ultimate survival of Alison Botha.
Currently on at The Baxter Theatre after opening here last weekend, Barney Simon’s Born in the RSA was resurrected to commemorate the local theatre legend’s 20-year passing (and 30th anniversary of the play’s debut). Referred to by many who saw this stellar piece (lead by Faniswa Yisa in the lead role) as “museum theatre”, this is the kind of thing visitors and learners to our museums need to see, instead of static pictures and accompanying descriptions on walls.
The festival is far from over, however, and there are several major productions still to make their debut here over the festival’s second weekend. Right at the top of that list is this year’s SBYA for Theatre, Christiaan Olwagen, and his new staging of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 classic, A Doll’s House.
Supported by a first-rate cast made up of Jennifer Steyn, Martin le Maitre, Dawid Minnaar, Anthea Thompson and Rob van Vuuren, and with choreography by Ina Wichterich, you would be an utter fool to miss seeing one of South Africa’s most gifted young theatre-makers ( Die Seemeeu, Dogma, Wie’s Bang vir Virginia Woolf?) in action when this piece opens on Friday.
In acclaimed author Craig Higginson’s The Imagined Land(also opening on Friday), a Zimbabwean novelist is about to undergo brain surgery, while her daughter, a literary critic studying in America, returns home to Johannesburg to take care of her. Directed by former artistic director of the Market Theatre Malcolm Purkey, the production stars Fiona Ramsay, Nat Ramabulana and Janna Ramos-Violante.
Alongside choreographer Jan Martens’ dance production, The Dog Days Are Over, the Government of Flanders and the Flemish-Dutch House deBuren are also debuting Tom Struyf’s Another Great Year for Fishing, as part of a NAF partnership this year.
Featuring Struyf alongside dancer Nelle Hens, I’m cryptically told that the production sees the two “looking for the fire exit.”
Presented by The South African State Theatre and the Arts Trust of South Africa (ATSA), last year’s SBYA for Theatre, Greg Homann’s A Voice I Cannot Silence is the final big production to check out when it opens here on Friday. Co-written by, and starring Ralph Lawson, the play explores the life and work of Alan Paton ( Cry, the Beloved Country) through the writer’s interaction with Anne Hopkins, who he employed in 1968 as a secretary shortly after the death of his wife.
l NAF runs until Sunday, www.nationalartsfestival.co.za, www.facebook.com/nationalartsfes tival, or follow @artsfestival on Twit- ter.