JOHNNY BOSKAK IS FEELING FUNNY. Written by Greig Coetzee. Co-Directed by Roslyn Wood-Morris and Craig Morris. With Craig Morris. Original Music by Syd Kitchen. At Kalk Bay Theatre until Saturday. TRACEY SAUNDERS reviews.
AT THE end of a war there are no winners just degrees of losers and Johnny Boskak is a high stakes loser. It is post 1994. The young white men turned soldiers have returned to a world in which they are not welcome. Meet Johnny Boskak, an anti-hero who can’t outrun his past and has no direction for the future.
He is “a disgrace to the Rainbow nation / On the side of perpetration / a white trash apartheid abomination”. His life no longer rhymes and he hits the road in search of something bigger than him which makes him feel less small. But first “a man has to face the dark before he faces the devil” and as you join him on his journey you become completely invested in the search.
From the outset he has no illusion about his failings and his frank disclosure of his time in the army is told with bitter rancour. We are given a glimpse in to the mind of a man who walks the streets “half man, half bomb.” The notion of an internal explosive device waiting to explode is used as he unpacks familiar tropes of masculinity with an acknowledgement that he is a disaster waiting to happen.
There are several remarkable things about this production. Craig Morris himself is a consummate physical performer. When he is involved in a motor vehicle accident we gasp as we watch him fly through the air and flinch when he hits the tarmac.
He executes grand physical scenes well but it is at the small gestures that he is a master – the opening flick of a lighter, the heavy draw of a cigarette, the deep drink from a bottle are all executed with the languid precision of a slow motion movie.
This is a one man show but the appearance of several characters takes you by surprise. The army officer spews hatred, eyes ablaze with sadistic cruelty. A short while later an alluring seductive woman strokes a pool cue with hypnotic grace. His transition between these characters is flawless. He meets and is “the devil and the lord / both drive cars he cannot afford”.
The vignette where the two banter about the future of Johnny’s soul is worth the cost of admission alone. His encounter with two unlikeable (to be charitable) brothers in a bar is a master-class in characterization. The revulsion at the sexist pair is immediate as Morris creates them with a curl of the lip and a snarl. Throughout the sixty minutes of rhyming couplets he doesn’t miss a beat.
He is comfortable enough in the silent moments which allow you a moment to absorb the lyrical beauty of the text. Coetzee’s script after all these years has lost none of it’s relevance.
The young men, both black and white that we encounter are forgotten by the ruling regime, unemployed and hopeless. The class divide and the personal quest for meaning are timeless themes. He is unafraid of the diversity of South Africa’s languages and embraces every strand; army slang, Afrikaans colloquialisms and tsotsitaal, all are woven together with an entrancing rhythm.
Profanities are uttered with a guttural desperation that give them a meaning far greater than mere shock value. Without a trace of sentimentality he shows the harsh reality of a country that was at war with itself. Without resorting to revisionism and with not an iota of nostalgia he shows the dehumanising of young men sent to ‘Nam (that’s Namibia) with the same distorted sense of nationalism as any American soldier sent to that other Nam.
Johnny’s escape from his past and a search for a place in the world is broader than an individual identity crisis. His quest mirrors that of a sector of the population trying to find itself. There is a political narrative which is underscored by his personal tale. While not looking for love he finds “lady luck is a girl named Eve” and consumed by lust, driven by desire he begins another mission. The Bonny and Clyde romance for a Natural Born Killers generation unfolds at a blistering pace as it tells the story about the redemptive power of love and the all consuming nature of revenge.
The simple set of the familiar yellow and black armco barrier transports you to the side of life’s highway. The only prop, a standard issue khaki balsak. The kitbag is a comfort and a burden and serves as a proxy for his lover and his enemy, a place to lay his head or absorb a well aimed kick. In addition to sketching characters he paints the country with phrases so vivid you can smell it – the dry dust outside Bloemfontein, the tacky tomato sauce in a roadside diner and the lush verdant green of the Natal valleys. His road trip sketches a South Africa under “sun infested rays” and the small towns with quirky differences and a mind numbing sameness appear like magic on the stage. He evokes images of those vast open plains “where the sky is high and heaven leans” to the mean streets of Hillbrow where there are “a few white lines and a lot of black tar”. From the shabbiness of Port Shepstone and the rough Bluff in Durban to the flame spewing Secunda he shows us a country that the travel guides miss.
Earlier this year at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown I entered the theatre with some scepticism. How entertaining could a one man show about a white man in post apartheid South Africa possibly be? Within five minutes Morris had me in the palm of his hand and when he relinquished his grip an hour later I was a believer. When I walked out I was emotionally exhausted and intellectually exhilarated. This run at the Kalk Bay Theatre is in a more intimate space which intensifies every emotion he lays bare. The richly satisfying piece evokes the poetic sensibility of Charles Bukowski and the gritty realism of Hunter S Thompson, but never loses sight of its innate South Africaness. One of the most human of activities is the overwhelming imperative to tell our stories and the compulsion to listen to them and Morris does this effortlessly. Whether Johnny finds love or his soul is redeemed remains to be seen. What is certain is that yours will be stirred by this passionately performed prose. Morris has toured this Gold Standard Bank Ovation Award winning production nationwide and internationally. If you missed it during the Cape Town Fringe here is another opportunity before Johnny hits the road and heads back north. Raise your thumb and catch a ride. You won’t regret it.
l Tickets: R125. No under 13s, 021 7882557.