On ‘Tobacco’, and its cure for the heart

Hesitantly proceeding onto the stage, fumbling with a wooden crate containing his briefcase, in a manner that depicts a nervousness so ingrained it’s become a way of life, Ivan walks to the phonograph intending to turn off the music playing on behalf of his entrance.

His action is arrested, however, by the beauty of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. He becomes entranced, his head moving closer and closer to the horn from whence the music issues, as if he wishes to climb into that flaring brass tube containing such delight, and hide forever from the world.

This scene played exquisitely by Andrew Buckland as our burdened anti-hero caught between his duty to address us and his desire to escape toward freedom and the acceptance thereof, is a profoundly poetic statement that guides us with gentle, unintentional humour and unaffected sorrow toward the resolution of Ivan’s internal conflict.

When I saw On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco at the National Arts Festival last year, I was moved most by the play’s resolution. Seeing it now for the second time, as Tobacco, and the Harmful Effects Thereof, it was the opening scene, in which not a word is spoken, that had me weeping for Ivan, and for his wife Nina magnificently portrayed by Toni Morkel. For while she, with her “rump, like shoulder of swan” and her sex “like iris, like seaweed, like mirror”, may be the source of his sorrow, the bully is as damaged, if not more so, by their own insecurity than the bullied by the abuse. The depth of his pain, the pain of their marriage, and the weight of it makes him want to drown in Pachelbel’s sentimental promise.

It is a pain common to all of us. This striving for freedom amidst a need for security and its attendant responsibilities, this love of companionship and the accompanying resentment at our lack of autonomy is a human condition.

Philosophers attempt to ease this dilemma through explanation and rational thought, religion attempts to salve it through devotion to higher consciousness, psychology through self awareness and psychiatry through medication, but it is the clown who embodies it and in doing so helps us accept it, even celebrate it, as part of life. And Buckland is the most consummate of clowns.

He takes Anton Chekhov’s On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco – a play about a man having a public breakdown while giving a pseudo-scientific lecture in the town hall – adapted by Will Harding with seamless splicing of literary luminaries such as Joyce and Kafka, and transforms this downtrodden, bullied, torn and trampled man into himself and by extension into ourselves, twanging a Jungian nerve strung through all barring the psychopathic.

For what is that stricken stare hidden deep behind the smile of the expectant father but the knowledge of freedom’s sacrifice for the joy of the warm puppy scent in a three-year-old’s hair? What are the unspoken words behind the response “we’re doing just fine” masking the loss of unexplored frontiers in exchange for the comfort of companionship? And their converse: The loss in a bachelor’s eyes as he rumples his nephew’s hair, the hint of forced enthusiasm in his voice as he announces “I’m off to hike the Appalachian trail, solo”. And all other compromises, large and small.

Yes I use the male here. I realise it’s a risk but Ivan’s breakdown, while resonating with the loss and doubt experienced by all, offers a masculine perspective which despite the preponderance of men in all the arts, is rarely elucidated. Perhaps because it is such a vulnerability. Too much a ‘feminine’ confession of interior doubt, it is, in masculine fashion, hidden by those who suffer from it most.

What Ivan reveals is how little power men have. We are not talking about the power to run corporations and governments and committees and start wars or end them. No, Ivan is operating in the personal, the domestic sphere, and there he is emasculated.

Biology determines who wears the pants in the house, it is an arena where men are destined to be the support act. Provided men are able to exercise agency elsewhere, this is generally a satisfactory arrangement. But when this too is denied them, whether it be due to unemployment, the suffocating cogs of a technocratic capitalist system, any number of vagaries of law and state or circumstance, a partner’s shackles or simply their own lack of ability, they turn to exerting their will in the personal and domestic sphere, where, if it is heteronormative, they are bound to lose. In this hopeless battle, frustration turns to depression, anger, violence domestic or sexual.

I’m talking broadly here, of course, in societal terms and, like Ivan, I digress.

Ivan is a gentle man, a good man whose lack of agency leads not to aggression but turns inward so that he is continually second-guessing himself even as he searches for his own salvation. Whether his wife accepts his new self awareness and responds with self-reflection in kind is not certain. This is Ivan’s story, not hers,despite her omnipresent power revealed by Morkel in perfectly executed cameos which are evidence of impeccable direction by Sylvaine Strike.

Whether Ivan is deluded, a madman speaking to an imagined audience, is also not certain. It may not matter, it is the interior life considered here, and a madman’s imagination has its own validity.

As Ivan, beyond drawing on his own life to hit that common artery, Buckland draws on his decades of clowning and mime to do things I doubt any Ivan has done, or might do again. I imagine that when he started talking about a fly in a snuff box, altering it from the figurative to the literal by then closing it and absent-mindedly putting it in his pocket, Strike said something in rehearsal along the lines of “that’s great Andrew, keep that”, to which Andrew replied “keep what?”.

Strike’s eye has been able to detect such nonchalant ability and make use of it through a subtly cumulative effect so that with Harding’s literary harvest and Morkel’s powerfully timed presence, this collaboration has the uncanny ability to float us on our own hopes, desires, frustrations and compromises into that Pachelbelan promise of a life more fully lived.

Tobacco, and the Harmful Effects Thereof is at the Baxter Flipside until 13 June before returning to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown between 2 and 12 July. Go to www.baxter.co.za for bookings and times.

–Steve Kretzmann