Author: Robyn Sassen

My African queen

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AntonyandCleopatra

HERE is my space: Mark Antony (Ben Kgosimore) with Cleopatra (Sanelisiwe Yekani). Photograph courtesy National Children’s Theatre.

THERE’S NOTHING QUITE like a foray with the world’s most famous illicit lovers, told by young voices to young audiences. It’s like being witness to the passing on of the baton to another generation of theatre makers and it might give you goosebumps, when you see Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra under the directorial hand of Neka da Costa. It’s currently on a programme touring schools, where the work is part of the national syllabus.

When you watch this troupe of performers, you wouldn’t be wrong to think of actors such as British performers Robert Lindsay and Dorothy Tutin, to say nothing of South Africa’s David Dennis and Camilla Waldman, for instance, who earned their stripes in Shakespearean trope as well as everything else. These young South African thespians continue to prove their robustness and versatility in redefining no less than the work of the Bard himself – you’ve seen them on the stage in a range of other capacities in the last couple of years, including contemporary storytelling and Greek tragedy.

The rendition of this work is gently and judiciously cut by Shakespeare specialist Rohan Quince to fit into time-based parameters and it runs just on 90 minutes with no interval. Interjected with a local drum beat, songs of mourning and gladness that reach from a South African heart and a peppering of ululation, it’s a piece which skirts and weaves the notion of Africanness in the ethos of Egyptian queen Cleopatra (Sanelisiwe Yekani) with competence and intrigue, but without feeling forced.

Indeed, Yekani embraces the complexity of Cleopatra with finesse and authority. She’s sly and manipulative, passionate and beautiful and as the central focus to the work, she holds it together with magnificence and utter potency. In short, she’s dangerous. Ben Kgosimore is a superb Mark Antony, the emperor who is her lover, a tough guy who is embroiled in a morass of political marriage, friends and foes. He’s vulnerable yet macho, sophisticated yet impressionable. And this royal couple takes things to the max from their passionate lovemaking and display of anger to their strategising, to their suicides.

In the role of Caesar, Cassius Davids shimmers with a focused performance which is utterly convincing and Campbell Meas in several roles, including Agrippa and Cleopatra’s hand-maiden lends tight focus and articulation to the work. Neo Sibiya, in a range of gender-ambiguous support roles also commands a sense of authority which makes you sit up and look.

Squeezed into a tiny space which is electrified into clean narrative lines with the device of freezing movement, and some highly innovative prop choices, the work is deftly made. There’s a battle scene and a scene of ships at war which will make you feel you’ve skipped the bounds of possibility and are now sitting in the folds of a dramatic fresco.

Having said all of that, the work is bruised by its shoutiness. And yes, while much of the drama necessitates exclamations in bold, not all of it does, and what you might find is something a little similar to how the NCT’s production of Coriolanus two years ago was flawed. The declamatory accents of everyone most of the time tends to collapse a sense of nuance in the dialogue.

It is, however, an immensely strong and invaluable resource for learners all over the country, because there’s nothing quite like seeing the work in flesh and blood – and local, young flesh and blood, at that. And also, because under astute direction, this complicated piece’s story is clearly evident.

  • Antony and Cleopatra is written by William Shakespeare and directed by Néka da Costa. It features design by Sarah Roberts (set and costumes) and Jane Gosnell (lighting) and is performed by Cassius Davis, Ben Kgosimore, Kevin Koopman, Campbell Meas, Sibusiso Mkhize, Neo Sibiya, Megan van Wyk, Carlos Williams and Sanelisiwe Yekani in a season that is touring several schools countrywide, until May 22. It is a project of the National Children’s Theatre. Call 011 484-1584 or visit http://www.nationalchildrenstheatre.org.za
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Four masked men, some rubbish and a lot of heart

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rommel

CROOKS in the night! Listen to Rommel Rommel, a refreshingly politically incorrect radio drama.

IF YOU COULD suspend moral and politically correct imperatives for the duration of Guy Ritchie’s 1998 comedy Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, you will absolutely relish the texture and narrative, the drama and gruff sweetness of Lee Doubell’s Afrikaans language radio drama that broadcasts on Radio Sonder Grense after the 9pm news on Thursday April 26. Entitled Rommel, Rommel, it’s a very well scripted little piece of doggerel which offers a back story to some common or garden crooks that will absolutely endear you to them.

Between men known only as “Meneer” (Johan Botha), “Oom” (Charl van Heyningen) and “Spiekeries” (Petrus du Preez), “Laaitie” (Leon Kruger) is a novice with his mum at the end of the cell phone, poised on a career of crookery, or rather something a little deeper and dirtier than the farm horizons in which he was born and nourished. And nourishment is the operative word. The men are busy plotting a ‘job’ that will yield nicely for the four of them. If it succeeds, that is.

And there unfolds a narrative of contingency plans and technological by-passes, of the possibilities of making it big and of those of walking away slowly and anonymously. It’s a little lacking in hairpin bends, but the root of the work is watered and nurtured by the intrinsic virtues of these characters, who are crafted beautifully in these 45 minutes. You can picture them in your mind’s eye like you would cartoon characters. They’re the gruff, rough stereotypes, the proverbial Bob Rebadow and Agamemnon Busmalis of the 1990s HBO prison drama, Oz, who might boast tough histories, but really are utter sweethearts who can make you melt with the realness of their values.

It’s a work clean of political jibes or moral shudders and is simply about the excitement and magic of a job well pulled off. It’s a work that will start your long weekend with a broad grin, leaving you rooting for the blokes on the other side of the law.

  • Rommel, Rommel (Rubbish, Rubbish) is written by Lee Doubell, one of the winners of the 2017 Sanlam Radio Theatre competition. Directed by Eben Cruywagen, and featuring technical input by Ricardo McCarthy, it is performed by Ivan Abrahams, Johan Botha, Lida Botha, Petrus du Preez, Keenan Herman, Leon Kruger and Charl van Heyningen, and debuts on RSG on Thursday April 26 at 9:10pm; it will be rebroadcast in the radio’s Deurnag programme, on Monday April 30 at 1am. It’s also available on podcast: rsg.co.za

Fatal direction

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fatal

OOH, the lust: Dan Gallagher (Ashley Dowds) gets all hot and heavy with Alex Forrest (Jazzara Jaslyn). Photograph courtesy Montecasino.

REMEMBER 1987? IN the flicks, it was a year of big hair and sexy killers. Glenn Close took on Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction, a film that was to forever corrupt the basically benign one-night-stand with a right dousing of psychopathology at its most sinister. The stage version of this era-changing film is at the moment on stage at Montecasino, and sadly, it ain’t what you might expect.

It’s an easy story line: Nice married guy meets psychopath in a bar. She seduces him once, twice. And all hell breaks loose, destroying everything in its wake — children, bunnies, cars, the whole bang shoot. On a level, the story’s straight forward, but without the requisite electricity, it turns diabolical.

For one thing, Jazzara Jaslyn, the actress cast in the role of the scary Alex Forrest, the woman who takes Dan Gallagher (Ashley Dowds) by the libido and doesn’t let go till she’s wrought all the damage she means to, lacks the kind of sinister gravitas of the psychopath. What you get instead, is a rather shrill young woman whose hysteria buttons are pressed more potently than her manipulative force. She’s irritating more than horrifying.

And while good intentions have been invested in the paring of the work down to its bare bones, there are elements in its presentation which are so solemnly attempted and so cringeworthily achieved you have to consciously force yourself not to laugh. The silliest moments are in the sex acts themselves where a lumpen kind of choreography features, forcing the poor performers to mime orgasms. It’s so crudely directed that it jars everything, making you yearn for the days when sex on stage was taboo, and directors had to resort to creativity to convey nuance.

Indeed, the nuance department in this play seems to have been closed down at the outset. The text lacks the kind of electricity and drama that it warrants and even the notorious boiled bunny, which is what many former Fatal Attraction film audience members might remember, is sidestepped.

By and large, aside from the novel introduction of the idea of a cell phone as an alternate conversational space, this work is sanitised, wooden and miscast. Dowds in the pivotal male role does his best, representing a seriously nice guy who falls, hook, line and sinker into the maw of a monster, but in this work, he’s up against strange odds, two too young blond lasses (the wife, Beth, is played by Jenny Stead) and a harsh and inappropriate musical sound track, to say nothing of a very obnoxious back drop which just doesn’t work. It features an ambiguous melange of women’s faces against a venetian blinds kind of number. Only it’s so self-consciously mysterious and it’s so very very large, that it crushes the play from the get-go.

Hold on to your horrified and titillated memory of the film that redefined the idiom ‘fatal attraction’; this play skipped some time on the drawing board.

  • Fatal Attraction is written by James Dearden and directed by Paula Bangles. It is performed by Jo da Silva, Ashley Dowds, Jazzara Jaslyn, Jenny Stead and Alex Tops until May 6 at the Pieter Toerien Theatre, Montecasino complex, Fourways. Call 011 511-1988 or visit http://www.pietertoerien.co.za

Curiouser and curiouser

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gordon_april2018

EVERY which way: Geometric forms, a drawing in charcoal and chalk on brown paper, by Gordon Froud. Photograph courtesy Total Exposure.

AS YOU ENTER the upstairs space, courtesy of the architects of the Standard Bank Gallery, there’s an implicit sense of event. This is obviously always the case. But it’s enhanced several-fold in Gordon Froud’s first major retrospective. How? Curatorial decisions have dramatically place a massive polyhedron in your face. This exhibition is about time – but it’s also all about space and geometry and God.

But ah! you might cry, as you summit the staircase, this polyhedron is stumped. It’s got blunt points. It’s dramatic, sure, but there’s something artisanal about it. And then you step a little closer and look at the tessellation wall works, which surround said polyhedron. They may you feel as though you have stepped into a child’s kaleidoscope on crack. And then you realise they’re made of black plastic coathangers and cable ties, and the blunt edges of the polyhedron are appropriate because the whole object is made of giant traffic cones. It is then that the world begins to turn on its axis for you as you engage with this extraordinary exhibition.

Mooted as a mid-career project, this exhibition sees Froud in his mid 50s, offering sophisticated and carefully articulated summation on all that he’s been working on and interested in through his career. And while the geometry is central to it all, there’s an ethos as to where this geometry is found and how it is extrapolated that keeps you curious to the very end.

But more than that, Froud takes the whole of the upstairs gallery space and uses it with clarity and empathy. It’s a humble exhibition that is about the real skills of looking and drawing on supports such as brown paper, but a proud one too, that examines a great diversity of artmaking approaches. Ultimately, it is satisfyingly balanced in the layout of work, which takes you through four ‘chapters’ of possibility.

You do, however, emerge from this exhibition remembering Froud’s fondness for all things Alice in Wonderland.  Not because there’s a Cheshire Cat secreted in the interstices of the lines and circles here, but rather because the mathematical ethos of Lewis Carroll’s madcap ideas are spun under the surface of these works.

And while as a body of work it touches on everything from Jewish to Christian to Hindu to Buddhist splays of spiritual values, it also doffs a cap to Leonardo’s thinking and sees a spot of geometry in the world as it stands. In doing so, it evokes the thinkings of György Doczi on proportional harmonies in nature and everything else.

That said, a couple of series in this exhibition, including the photographs of the figure in geometry, feel almost too diagrammatic and if you’re not in the know in terms of mystical values, they may leave you cold. Similarly, a series of embossed images toward the chronological closure of the show feel so busy that you cannot look at them. But Froud is an interesting character and this exhibition really does go the extra mile in offering something for everyone. It’s astonishing to acknowledge that all of this is the work of one artist.

And further to everything, this society has a troubling relationship of not being able to celebrate its own. For whatever reason. Often an artist needs to go overseas and earn ticks from the so-called “International community” before he or she gets a nod from local establishments. Froud’s show here and now kind of bucks this trend, but for a mid-career show to be mounted in the latter years of as prolific a practitioner as he, feels uncomfortable. However, as you walk through the four chapters of this exhibition, so do you realise that this is most likely where serious fine art in contemporary society is pointing right now: the invested thought. The carefully drawn line. The gesture that is unashamedly analogue. This is an important show for all the right reasons.

  • Harmonia: Sacred geometry, the pattern of existence by Gordon Froud is at the Standard Bank Gallery, central Johannesburg, until June 15. 0860 123 000.

How to say it for always

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vlerke

LETTING go of an angel: the underpinning theme in Janine van der Linde’s Vlerke vir Jason. Photograph courtesy http://www.colourbox.com

THE DEVASTATION AND psychological whirlwind that comes of sudden loss can rip up the threads of one’s established identity and turn everything completely upside-down. Irrevocably. This is the focus in the tender and raw story, Vlerke vir Jason (Wings for Jason) that is this week’s Afrikaans-language radio drama on Radio Sonder Grense. Structurally tight, and simple in its premises, it offers a strong and poignant foray into Coloured stereotypes as it explores a particular kind of madness with directness but also with sensitivity.

Nadine Williams (Leané Valentyn) is a young woman in love. Her child and her husband are her everything, and amid snippets of Lionel Richie love songs sung to one another in the deliriousness of their happiness, theirs is an association which feels complete. But this story begins at the end and it is the flashbacks and dreams she experiences which give meat to the nuances and answer the unanswered.

The place where you first encounter Nadine is not, however, her happy place. The play begins in a municipal prison, where the sergeant (Brendon Daniels) is patronising and humiliating if not downright cruel and “Ma Fay” (June van Merch) an orderly in the women’s section offers the grit and idioms of a particular type of character in the institution. She’s gruff but she’s got soul, she’s frazzled, but there’s a history. It’s a scary place which resonates with echoes and the soundscape portrays it as cold and unforgiving.

What brings Nadine there, weeping and bedraggled, isolated and uncommunicative? The government? The gangsters? The culture in which she has been living all her life? Perhaps. Perhaps all of the above. But it is not what you might assume. While this work deals with stereotypes it has a soul that doesn’t allow a set of circumstances to be reflected one-sidedly.

It’s another tissue quencher – you’ll need a few at different moments in this play – but there are also moments of horror which reflect on the kind of things that the bereaved do, not because they’re insane or criminal, but because their sense of logic, reality and consequences is all broken and blurry with tears.

  • Vlerke vir Jason (Wings for Jason) is written by Janine van der Linde. Directed by Margot Luyt, and featuring technical input by Cassi Lowers, it is performed by Simone Benjamin, Brendon Daniels, Marlo Minnaar, Lindy Stander, Leané Valentyn and June van Merch, and debuts on RSG on Thursday April 19 at 8pm, it will be rebroadcast in the radio’s Deurnag programme, on Monday April 23 at 1am. It’s also available on podcast: rsg.co.za

Nearly 2 500 ways to seize the day

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LeisureSeeker

ALMOST in heaven: John Spencer (Donald Sutherland) and his wife Ella (Helen Mirren) on the trip of a lifetime. Photograph courtesy http://www.miamifilmfestival.com

LET’S FACE IT: our inimitable icons of stage and screen are aging. They’re still beautiful, they’re still sexy and they still have what it takes. Thank goodness the film industry is capable of recognising this and of granting performers such as Judi Dench, Meryl Streep, Annette Bening, Julie Walters and Vanessa Redgrave plum roles in which they can celebrate the inevitability of aging. The Leisure Seeker is another gem of this sort, giving voice to delicious performances by Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland as an elderly couple who go rogue on their children, for one last fling.

Ellen (Mirren) and John Spencer (Sutherland) have had a rich, full life. He was a teacher of English literature with a particular penchant for Ernest Hemingway. They’ve two adult children. And they have a 1975 RV which has seen many a holiday with them. But here they are. Neither are in the first flush of health, but life’s for the grabbing and they decide to do a drive from Boston to Florida Keys to see Hemingway’s house.

That’s a drive of nearly 2 500km for the pragmatic. If you’re elderly, with fading memories and bits and pieces that no longer work as they used to, that’s almost the recipe for catastrophe. And catastrophic this is, particularly from the other end of a cell phone like to their children, Jane (Janel Moloney) and William (Christian McKay).

But amid the realities of incontinence and fervour, knee-jerk responses and utter hilarity, this is by all accounts, the journey of a lifetime. Mirren and Sutherland sparkle unforgettably in this beautiful yet thoughtful celebration of what it takes to grow old. The dialogue is crisp and bristly and the context real in terms of how the power is inverted when the parents are old and the children, grown, putting the giggles on the side of grandparents, and the punitive frowns on the side of the kids.

Narratively, the plot wanes a bit in terms of it feeling like adventure upon adventure and reading like a bit of a shopping list, characterised by an “and then … and then … and then” rhythm, but by and large, it’s a laugh and a cry at every stop in the road.

Irresponsible? Absolutely! But life is short and it’s completely for the living. It’s a Thelma and Louise kind of a tale which ends as it must, leaving you with a wet face, but a smiling one.

  • The Leisure Seeker is directed by Paolo Virzi and is performed by a cast headed by Helen Abell, Nicholas Barrera, Lilia Pino Blouin, Carl Bradfield, Robert Walker Branchaud, Roger Bright, Andrea C. Brotherton, Gabriella Cila, Danielle Deadwyler, Adam Drescher, Marc Fajardo, Dick Gregory, Carlos Guerrero, Ryan Clay Gwaltney, Wayne Hall, Joe Hardy Jr, Lucy Catharine Haskill, Rusty Hodgdon, Joshua Hoover, Denitra Isler, Dana Ivey, Ariel R. Kaplan, Jessie Sasser Kloos, Ahmed Lucan, Burk Madison, Dov Mamann, Elijah Marcano, Christian McKay, Matt Mercurio, Joshua Mikel, Helen Mirren, Kirsty Mitchell, Janel Moloney, Lindsey Moser, Robert Pralgo, Chelle Ramos, Jerald Jay Savage, David Silverman, Mylie Stone, Leander Suleiman, Donald Sutherland, Karen Valero, Sean Michael Weber, Ben White and Geoffrey D. Williams. It is written by Stephen Amidon, Francesca Archbugi, Francesco Piccolo and Paolo Virzi, based on the eponymous novel by Michael Zadoorian. Produced by Marco Cohen, Fabrizio Donvito, Benedetto Habib and Bryan Thomas, it features creative input by Carlo Virzi (music), Luca Bigazzi (cinematography), Jacopo Quadri (editing), Ellen Jacoby (casting),Massimo Cantini Parrini (costumes) and Richard A. Wright (production). Release date: March 30 2018.

When Gloria met Peter

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Film Stars

ROMEO and Juliet: Gloria Grahame (Annette Bening) and Peter Turner (Jamie Bell) embrace their love, their lives and the Bard. Photograph courtesy http://www.austinchronicle.com

IT’S A GREAT rarity for a child actor who wows his audience to go away and come back to the industry all grown up and wow some more. This is exactly what you get in Paul McGuigan’s film Film stars don’t die in Liverpool, which features Jamie Bell as Peter Turner. This unique love story which is based on the true story of American film actress Gloria Grahame (1923-1981), penned by Turner himself, is the kind of film that will give you hope for the future of this society – and its filmmaking culture – it’s elegant and beautifully constructed with strong messages and gritty performances. And like any other love story, it’s about giving with a full heart and letting go, but there are so many delicate edges to it, you will want to watch this film over and over again. Forever.

Seventeen years ago, Jamie Bell was the child who defined Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliott (2000), a story about a Northern England boy, the son of a miner in the riotous 1980s who wanted to do ballet. Today, he’s an adult, but the maverick fire in his belly and his ability to embrace complex social issues is as refined and beautiful now as they were then.

Again, we’re in the 1980s, with all its dance moves and analogue culture, in this wild romance. And the girl in the love story? It’s none other than Annette Bening, who is magnificent as a Grahame in her fifties. The love is passionate and unconventional, and Peter’s mum is played by the inimitable Julie Walters. Indeed, with Vanessa Redgrave playing Grahame’s mother, this film offers a full house of fabulous actresses over 60 and it celebrates them in ways that make you value the elderly in your own community.

But more than all of this, Film stars don’t die in Liverpool offers the kind of perfection that very few films can. Featuring a mature understanding of silence and wall paper patterns, of subtlety and finesse, along the lines of Hal Ashby’s 1971 Harold and Maude, which remains arguably one of the finest Holocaust films ever; it’s about exploring your lover’s body and finding truths which she can never tell you. It’s about what happens when marriage doesn’t seal your love, giving your lover’s relatives priority over you when it comes to death.

You know how this film will end by the very virtue of its title, but the predictability of the work is not the point. This is a film that embraces the brevity of life with fierceness and verve. It heightens the bar for the possibility of telling a story of this nature, enormously. It’s a film that makes you feel like you’ve stepped back into the glamour and magic of 1950s Hollywood, with all its illusions of sincerity, its stars and its unbroken dreams.

  • Film stars don’t die in Liverpool is directed by Paul McGuigan and is performed by Lee Adach, Anna Afferr, Tim Ahern, Lasco Atkinds, Rick Bacon, Frances Barber, Joey Batey, Roy Beck, Gintare Beinoraviciute, Jamie Bell, Annette Bening, Suzanne Bertish, Leanne Best, Michael Billington, James Bloor, Edward Bourne, Mark Braithwaite, Michael Brand, Tom Brittney, Joanna Brookes, Jade Clarke, Kenneth Cranham, Paul Dallison, David Decio, Stephanie Eccles, Karl Farrer, Helen Iesha Goldthorpe, Vaslov Goom, Stephen Graham, Leon Grant, Leila Gwynne, Alan Wyn Hughes, Alex Jaep, Bentley Kalu, John Kinory, Isabella Laughland, Adam Lazarus, Ify Mbaeliachi , Gemma Oaten, Luana Di Pasquale, Gino Picciano, Vanessa Redgrave, Jason Redshaw, David Soffe, Alexandra Starkey, Asmeret Tesfagiorgis, Glynn Turner, Peter Turner, Jay Villiers, Julie Walters, Nicola-Jayne Wells, Susan Westbury, Patricia Winker and Charlotte Worwood. It is written by Matt Greenhalgh, based on the eponymous memoir by Peter Turner. Produced by Barbara Broccoli and Colin Vaines, it features creative input by J. Ralph (music), Urszula Pontikos (cinematography), Nick Emerson (editing), Debbie McWilliams (casting), Jany Temime (costumes) and Eve Stewart (production). Release date: March 22 2018.