Pay Back The Curry: Fix that time machine

Sjoe! This country is tiresome. About as tiresome as this play.

Ag no. That makes it sound like Pay Back The Curry wasn’t enjoyable. Which isn’t accurate. It was great, for the first 45 minutes, and then the last 20 minutes were spent wishing actor Daniel Richards would get back into his time machine and let us get out for some fresh air.

This has nothing to do with internet-reduced attention span or being trained by too many scaf-seated festival circuits to succumb to leg cramp at the 50-minute mark, and everything to do with this show having no storyline. It is a series of skits without a narrative arc to maintain sustained interest and there’s only so much word play, puns and barbed monologue – however clever, surprising and ‘I-never-though-of-that similes it throws out – that can be borne before it becomes more of the same.

Whether the length of this show is to be placed at director Rob van Vuuren or writer Mike van Graan’s door is anyone’s guess but van Graan’s tendency to prescribe a somewhat biblical quality to his text; as if once writ, in stone it be, weighs the scales a touch on that outcome.

That being said, his chisel is pretty sharp here, cutting across a wide tablet that includes Zuma (of course), Malema, Maimane, #Fallism, casual and entrenched racism, white privilege, black entitlement and coloured flip-flopism to deliver, on the whole, an amusing critique of our rumbunctious, opinionated, bi-polar society.

To his credit, it wasn’t all satirical pot-shots loaded with ammunition from the eMandGee, there were a couple of sensitive sketches that quieted the dyed-blonde-fro-mohawk-to-Athlone-headscarf ranging audience and delivered the pain of displacement and unwelcome felt by the refugee through a poetry reading which took Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech out of its recalled cabinet and blew the dust off it, into our faces. Nice one.

Likewise the women’s football champ awards speech should be played from the Olympic podium as a forceful push against the overwhelming patriarchy, not only in sport, but on all society’s playing fields.

Daniel Richards is superb in turning this writ into flesh and blood, so much so that I even forgave him his afro man-bun. His handsome aquiline face is both appealing and expressive, his physical presence tuned to just the right dial of boisterous containment and he nails a wide range of local accents and mannerisms, including our murderous bladerunner (although if Richards could have shed a tear – make that a bucketful – in that scene he would have blown the door down) and manages the comic timing of a tongue-twisting script with aplomb.

Van Vuuren runs a tight ship, his direction artfully sails this work upon waters on which similar satirical scripts from van Graan have foundered from a surfeit of didactic ballast and it’s clear his skill at expanding his presence to take control of the stage has been transferred to Richards. So much so that Richards’ occasional fiendish grin was a mirror of van Vuuren’s, as were several moments of physical language. I had to blink a few times as I saw Richards transform into a taller, darker, more handsome version of our favourite fake (now for reals) be-snorred comic actor who can actually act.

Which is funny, but fine. After all, 19 years ago, van Vuuren had moments of transforming into a shorter, blonder, less handsome version of Andrew Buckland – as did James Cairns, just replace blonde with ginger – but developed a vocabulary of his own as he went along.

But as full as the sails may be with the breath of beguiled audiences, this entire crew should mutiny against producer Siv Ngesi who appears to have exchanged art for business in the comedy genre with his ExploSIV Productions. Reason being is that surely he is ultimately responsible for signing off on the unremittingly awful posters for this deplorably named show that blare their bad taste from every second lamp post along the city’s thoroughfares. It is a rare case of Metrorail users being the most fortunate of all commuters as they have been spared the sight of a goggle-eyed, be-turbaned Richards twisting his mouth into a duh!-I’m-so-surprised-and-don’t-know-how-I-got-here-but-I’m-a-really-nice-oke expression, with a South African flag scarf thing draped around his neck.

Combined with the low-brow title Pay Back The Curry it is a Leon Schuster goes to Chatsworth pitch to the lowest common denominator rather than a Zuma goes to Guptastan reference for the politically literate (a different form of lowest common denominator here in Mzansi) it’s supposed to be. As such, it’s insulting and a paradoxical testament to van Graan and van Vuuren’s rep that anyone, and I mean anyone, ever buys a ticket to this show. And they have been, apparently, in droves. Or perhaps not. Perhaps us Saffas are really just a collective of moegoes who believe that is the image of great entertainment and Ngesi is simply clever enough to tap into the pulse. After all, we do still have Zuma as president.

Short version:

Try ignore the poster, it’s worth seeing the show. If you follow the news it won’t change your life or provide new insight but it will offer amusing visual metaphors for the cruel joke our politics and parliament have become. You’ll probably have a few laughs in the first 45mins but take a rosary along to get you through the last quarter. That way you can keep yourself occupied by counting the beads in the dark.

Pay Back The Curry is at the Baxter Golden Arrow Studio until 27 August, after which it goes to the Kalk Bay Theatre for a run around. Book here.

— Steve Kretzmann