Standard Bank National Arts Festival (review)

The National Arts Festival in Grahamstown aims both to sum up recent cultural activity in South Africa and bring in artists and works from abroad. This year European and American plays (mainly produced by South African companies) dominated the twelve main festival productions, while the fringe, with 125 plays to offer, featured primarily local playwrights and performers. The size of the festival makes further generalizations difficult, but the twenty-six plays I saw fell into four broad categories: first, major conventional dramatic productions involving large casts and elaborate sets and intended primarily for affluent audiences at prominent cultural venues; second, physical theatre, in which sets and dialogue are secondary to corporeal dexterity and kinetic exuberance; third, one-person productions, which are a response to limited resources for theatre and involve wide varieties of skills, approaches, and target audiences; and, fourth, community theatre, which takes a number of forms but is always produced on a limited budget, usually with an amateur or semiprofessional cast, and intended for the cultural enrichment or education of less affluent audiences in the townships.

Of the major productions the most noteworthy was the five-hour epic Donkerland (Dark Land) written and directed by Deon Opperman and portraying the rise and fall of Afrikaans nationalism from 1838 to 1996 through the lives of one family on their eponymously titled farm. Opperman transforms the history of his people from a heroic tale of righteous battles and triumph to a series of grim, self-absorbed conflicts first with an English enemy they cannot conquer and then with Black compatriots whose humanity and power they refuse to recognize. Opperman very deftly translates the conflicts of large social groups into individual confrontations and by assigning multiple roles to the actors creates ironic resonances in the performance that draw together the vast period dramatized. Thus, in the first scene (1838) the founder of Donkerland (Pieter de Witt, played by André Odendaal) has his horse stolen by an English minister (David Clatworthy) while he is in the bushes making love to a Zulu maiden (Meidjie, played by Seipati Montsho). In the penultimate scene, 138 years later, a descendant of Pieter (Odendaal again) is served with a paternity suit (by Clatworthy) on behalf of a descendant of Meidjie (again played by Montsho).

The actors’ bodies take on allegorical significance as transhistorical archetypes that both underlie and are transformed by the particular historical moments in which they find themselves. Thus, the varying performance styles of the actors become comments on the historical moment as well as displays of performative skill. André Odendaal in particular, as the young Afrikaner lead, marks the changing epochs with pointed shifts in temperament from phlegmatic aloofness to bigoted anger to complaisant self-satisfaction. The characters he plays are usually divided between himself and an older, more robust actor as the years roll on, but, significantly, he is both the first and last Afrikaner on the stage. His slim physique imparts a note of frailty to the last character seen, but the ghosts of his other roles in the play, which were always filled with energetic pertinacity, hover over this final scene, suggesting that although his chosen historical identity is about to be obliterated with the loss of the family farm, the current of history will still be animated in some way by his contribution to it.

The most daringly immediate and comic physical theatre was Boy Called Rubbish, concocted by Ellis Pearson and Bheki Mkhwane from the daunting wreckage of urban South African life. Pearson plays Rubbish and Mkhwane his tyrannical stepmother, drunken stepfather, sadistic teacher, and numerous other abusive or abused township characters. Although arriving eventually at a fairy tale ending in which Rubbish wins universal praise for his heroism, the story has several false finishes that point up the grimmer realities with which street children must contend. “So he went to bed hungry again and his life never got much better, the end,” the actors announce halfway through the show and wait to see if the audience is gullible enough to applaud...