LAUGHING WILD. Directed by Luke Ellenbogen, with Schalk Bezuidenhout and Francesca Michel. At the Arena Theatre, UCT Hiddingh campus, Thursday to Saturday at 8pm untill January 31. STEYN DU TOIT reviews.
IF you’re a drama graduate or amateur theatre enthusiast, chances are good that at some point you’ve had to sink your teeth into Christopher Durang’s riotous tuna fish monologue. Taking place in a suburban supermarket, a corporate yuppie-type finds her view to the tuna shelf blocked by another customer taking a very long time to decide on a product.
Irate and buckling under the pressures of modern living, we become privy to her increasingly murderous thoughts about this fellow shopper who appears intent on making her life miserable. Hyperventilating, huffing and puffing, and eventually even reduced to fits of hysterical cackling, it was only a question of when she’d lose it.
Directed by Luke Ellenbogen, Laughing Wild takes its title from a line in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. During the scene Winnie, who is embedded waist-deep in a low mound, is heard exclaiming: “Oh, well, what does it matter, that is what I always say, so long as one… what is that wonderful line... something, something laughing wild amid severest woe.”
Divided into three scenes, it is in this production’s final loony scene where the implications of those words ring loudest. In a free-for-all situation where you’re essentially busy dying again from the moment you’re born, throwing your hands up in in the air might just be the best way to make it mentally through this roller coaster ride we call life. “Andries, what is life?” the scientist in Jan Rabie’s famous sci-fi short story, Ek Het Jou Gemaak(I created you), asks the AI robot he had built a few months earlier. “Aanhou beweeg en geraas maak (to keep moving and making noise),” the automaton replies.
Sitting on a park bench shortly after the above mentioned incident in the shop, Laughing Wild’s first scene sees Michel’s unnamed character take us hostage into listening to the stream of consciousness spilling from her mouth.
After also seeing this talented young actress make her professional debut last year in the Christopher Weare-directed Curl Up and Dye, I’m left with no doubt that she’ll deservedly be rising in the local theatre ranks in years to come.
Making eye contact with individual audience members, sometimes coming right up to you, or throwing a piece of used tissue at you, it’s clear that the episode her character just experienced was the culmination of years of straws being loaded onto the camel’s back.
“Tell me, are you enjoying my company or are you wishing I’d go away?”, she comes up and asks me directly (of course I made the mistake of sitting in the front row!). “I can never tell in life, it’s one of my problems,” she continues apologetically. “Reality testing of any sort is a mystery to me, my doctors say.”
By that point so completely drawn in by her kamikaze towards a nervous breakdown, I find myself quickly reassuring her that there’s nothing more that I’d like than for her to continue speaking.
Bezuidenhout’s character, a “I prefer to see the glass as half full” type of motivational speaker with a thick Afrikaans accent, takes centre stage during the second scene.
Dressed in an unflattering tweed jacket, his curly Afro stubbornly parted in the middle, his routine follows a similar kind of interpersonal approach than Michel’s.
“How do I feel? I feel good!”, we are encouraged to chant along with him. Ironically, however, he then goes on to frequently interrupt himself in order to launch into fits of insecurity or pessimism. “I was in the supermarket the other day about to buy some tuna fish, when I sensed this very disturbed presence right behind me,” he eventually confesses in a shaken tone.
Standing in front of a giant board with a drawing of some kind of Eye of Horus derivation, with Bezuidenhout’s character, Durang not only focuses on the man’s version of what happened in the shop that day, but comments on our society’s obsession with everything esoteric as well.
Having already established himself away from theatre as an up-and-coming stand-up comedian, Bezuidenhout has both the talent and potential as an actor to do what Jim Carrey did in The Truman Show, or Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love.
Staged for the first time in 1987, the final major theme addressed in his character’s monologue, expertly executed with just the right amount of comedic timing, relates to the Aids epidemic of the 80s.
As with many other aspects of Ellenbogen adaptation – including the changing of names and locations to suit Cape Town, together they nonetheless manage to find the contemporary relevance to Durang’s ( Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike) words 28 years later.
Featuring both performers engaging in a fantastic display of slapstick, witty word battles and physical theatre, it is in their final moments together on stage where several visual references uttered over the course of the past 90-minutes come together in one surprisingly poignant departure.
A very entertaining production that deliberately sets out to challenge, disturb and even sometimes annoy its viewer, with only three performances left of Laughing Wild you’d be silly not to head over to the Arena theatre for a thorough prodding.
l Tickets: R100, luke.ellenbo [email protected]