Hard scenes in the new SA

I-See-You-Poster-A1_thumbSmoking can save your life. Prevent serious injury. At least save you from having to hand over your possessions.

‘Strue. We walking from the Dance Factory, across Mary Fitzgerald Square there in Newton. It was dark. We on our way to the Market Theatre. I roll a smoke and light it while we walk. Taking a drag, I check three guys hanging around those concrete pillars along the side of the road. What they called – bollards? They look like car guards having a chat, they got those lumo vests. Two with yellow and one with a orange one. Suddenly the one guy rips off his vest and rolls it around his forearm as he moves fast toward me, gabbling a whole lot of kak and the two other guys peel off from the bollard and kinda spread out loose behind him.

Next thing this guy is right in my face, loud and making no sense. I’m thinking ‘if you want something say it and why are you so close to me?’ So I tjune him, loud: ‘What?’

He blinks, his chommie in the orange vest, the one with more scars across his face than even this ou who is close enough to head butt me and looks like he might do it, gives me the eye, but the ou in my face slips to the side, falls into step and tjunes “I jus’ wanna skyf. Givus a skyf”.

I take a last long pull and a look at the hard living on their gessigge, hand it over and keep walking.

My girl is shaking. She’s sharper than me. I check how dark it is, how empty the street, and it hits me that somehow, for some reason, we just dodged a bullet. Okay, not a bullet, it would more likely been a knife. My ignorant bravado might have caught him off guard but I reck it was the smoke that saved us, gave the guy something to shift onto after he lost his edge, a want more immediate than a cellphone that would need to be fenced or a wallet that would need the effort of violence to attain.

It was a good setup for the play we were going to, Mongiwhekhaya’s I See You.

Like a skinny scarred oke bunching a vest over his forearm as he strides toward you, I See You comes at you with menace. But not the just-kapped-woonga babbling we walked into, the other South African scenario: contained, directed malevolence fully aware of the blood its going to cost and not flinching at the paying.

Then for a moment you think it’s going to all be cool, everyone grooving to MetroFM on a Friday night. Ha! Don’t forget where you are, majita. This isn’t the mellow streets of Paris, bru. Over here, people are desperate. Over here, people are fucked up. People got nothing to lose. You let your guard slip at your peril. Like the laaitie who emerges as our protaganist. He tjunes the cops he’s got rights. Larnie skeems he’s still in the UK. Yoh!

So imagine: We got a Zulu cop off his tree (Desmond Dube). Ex MK. So seething with bitterness and anger that his wife has taken out a restraining order on him. We got his cop partner (Sibusiso Mamba) who’s brutalised by the job but still has a shred of humanity left, although that shred is snuffed out by fear of his trigger happy sidekick. Into the arms of this vortex of impending violence is thrown our larnie, Ben (Bayo Gbadamosi). A black ou, Xhosa name an’ everything, but can’t speak a word of it, just came back home to study law after being whisked away to Engaland as a baby. He reckons this streetwise east lollipop joller (Jordan Baker) is sweet on him but her candy turns things pretty sour. We got a rocker white-ou (Austin Hardiman) who skeems he’s cool but the woman-beating racist is a snake to our Nguni bull of a mad cop. Then there’s a doctor (Amaka Okafor) who doesn’t give a shit and a station commander (Lunga Radebe) who denies any shit.

Not exactly a pretty picture. Not a good night out. A bit of a rough ride. Especially for our unititiated tjommie from the overseas.

Only thing is, when you grow up in a place, you kinda know how that place works. No South African with a bit more than an arse for brains is gonna tjune a mal cop about his rights. Nooit. You make things smooth, you co-op-er-ate, beat around the bush, pretend you’re stupid maybe.

So for awhile I couldn’t make out this oke’s case, why he was making life so hard for himself. He’s a law student – but that’s not enough to be so dof. It’s only much later we make out that he’s a black soutie, for real. Maybe his accent shoulda been a clue but I’ve got so used to bad accents in South African theatre that I sort of ignore them now. And his was bad, it kept slipping between Brixton and Braamfontein, so I just tossed it out. The white-rocker who acted like a kak ou also didn’t seem to know if he was in Hyde Park or Hillbrow. I mean the real Hyde Park. In London. But otherwise the acting was fantastic man. Really. Those okes had me right there, even figuring out why this larnie was being such a moron.

And the set was kiff. A woman called Soutra Gilmour did it. Stark. Like the back of a police van. Like a parking lot behind an abandoned mine. Like the loose bits of gravel in a midnight street when it hits you in the face. The lights did rad things too, thanks to a oke called Richard Howell. Flickered like the ones in the police cell, made you feel like you were about to be stripped of your belt and your shoelaces. Or went dim like the one inside your car, gooi-ing enough light to make a zol but not enough to find the dropped lighter. You know.

People who work in theatre and know things tell me directing on a thrust stage, with the audience on three sides, is moerse difficult, and other than the slipping accents which chucked away the reason for Ben’s harde-gat attitude – until I got wise to it much later – the direction was spot on. It was the first time actress Noma Dumezweni was doing it but she did it fully well.

As for the writer, Mongiwekhaya, well his script got played ’cause it was chosen as the one – like Neo – by the Genesis Foundation’s international skrywers’ residency programme with the Royal Court. You don’t have to come from Bellville to see why. Poor oke paid a tough price to get this story, you don’t really make this shit up, you have to live it. Reckon he knows how to Pantsula now.

I See You is at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg until 1 May and then at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town from 6 – 28 May.

— Steve Kretzmann

28.04.2016

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