Spanish Steps: Last Laugh at the bottom of the ladder

If this play feels like déjà vu, then you are exactly where you should be. Spanish Steps pits dreams and folly in such intimate proximity that it trips you into a theatrical mirror of where your life could end up: locked in the basement with a dreaded work-colleague, apparently.

It is humour with a spirit of sensitive pathos. A dramedy based on the existential need to forgive one’s predecessors of their failings and find the freedom to follow unique paths. It is a comedy of standing still for 25 years and the drama of trying to not repeat the same old, same old, pattern, where roles and responsibilities are so overwhelming that we end up hating our lives and resenting the ones we loved.

Set in an office building’s basement, with a door that needs a broom to hold it open, Spanish Steps off-sets the capitalist measure of success: “climbing up the ladder”, with an invitation to come downstairs instead. Downstairs, in the basement of an office building with piles of old boxes, scruffy office chairs and a rubbish bin amidst balls of crumpled paper.

Enter Barry, the kind of stock character who appears onto the stage wiping his hands with moist toilet paper, after flushing the toilet in the back corner. A white, grey-haired, balding man (played by Gavin Werner) presenting the quintessential foot-shuffling, porn-watching, hates-his-job worker who has been at his post for far too long.

This expectedly annoying old-white-male character becomes the key to an uncanny opening of a door to compassion. Gavin Werner, who writes and acts in Spanish Steps tells The Cape Robyn that he wrote his character after his father as well as himself. When Werner began ageing, he realized that he displayed some of his father’s characteristics and began the long journey of writing this play.

Barry’s entrance is familiar. Not only does the current tour of John Kani’s Kunene and the King begin similarly – old white man flushes toilet and drags himself onto the stage – but there is a vivid picture of tired, old, patriarchal whiteness releasing itself from repeating its old performance. In Kani’s play it is 25 years of racial democracy onstage. In Spanish Steps, the satire simmers gently until it brews with the politics of relationships. And this two-hander places the relationship of a man and a woman into the pot, not race.

A woman enters by climbing down the stairs to the man’s cave and they both see each other’s shadows reflected by their carefully maintained images. Yes, the unkempt image of the protagonist is actually his life-long rebellion against being primed into “Mr Right”. Barry has been married for 25 years, with a daughter of 25 years of age, and at the same job for about the same number of years. He hates his life. A familiar fate.

His counterpart in the two-hander comedy drama is Maureen, the HR director. A pencil-skirt and blazer wearing career-woman who preens like a bird, is taut at the neck from the labour of always putting her nose in the air. The pair make for a hilarious contrast as Dianne Simpson delivers a stupendously nuanced performance of her own stereotypical role. The rub is that these characters turn out not to be stereotypes at all. The audience becomes part of the theme of expectation and performance when challenged with the shift into the characters depths. ‘Will you please allow me one moment to stand on my victim podium’, Barry shouts, at the play’s height. But he pauses.

There is a tension between expectation and performance. The performer has to stop playing along for change to happen. Barry’s desire to be pursue his dream means he can choose to be vulnerable. But he is stuck playing a victim in a basement.

In Spanish Steps, this failure begins as a farce, beginning as an open trouser-fly and snot-on-handkerchief kind of slapstick that just fails to hit the mark of its many initial puns. Then, déjà vu kicks in and the world that looked annoyingly familiar moves closer to being a mirror of our journeys, up or down. We all sit together, realising our role as hierarchical viewers, looking down on Barry, and something shifts. Eventually the door opens. A different story is possible.

There is much-needed tender introspection, sardonic humour, and awareness vital in our post-pandemic theatre. Caroline Midgley’s layered directorial touch makes one wonder how tender human failings can be treated with such ridiculous banality as the sound of pornography blaring overhead from a pot-bellied office worker’s cell, and yet still have you leave the theatre re-assessing how you live.

Unfortunately, Spanish Steps has finished it’s run at the National Arts Festival.

Written by Gavin WernerCast:
Barry (Male lead): Gavin Werner
Maureen (Female lead): Dianne Simpson
Director: Caroline Midgley
Lighting Design: Frans Mandilakhe Zunguze
Photography: Rethea Boer