Unruly: Man apes ape

Walking casually to the stage, on which some of the audience – proscenium arch abandoned – sit in chairs arranged in a circle, Andrew Buckland steps under the lights as Dr Rob Campbell, primatologist.

Within the space of a few sentences, we are no longer an audience, we are participants in a highly charged Skemer Baai town hall meeting at which he, reluctantly, is to address the emotive issue of baboons, and what can be done about them.

He hauls his cellphone out and disparages his and our ridiculous attachment to these devices and tells us to switch them off. Now. Immediately.

Someone pipes up: “Off, or on flight mode?”

“Off!” says Rob Campbell.

I tried to switch mine off but the usual tricks didn’t work. Despite having used it for three or four months, the only time it had turned off was when the battery died. Flight mode was my only option, there was not enough time to search the internet for instructions.

Its rectangular weight in my pocket now felt like a loaded gun with the safety off. What if I hadn’t properly activated flight mode? What if some forgotten alarm went off? (Which, embarrassingly, had once happened during a show.)

Buckland had these hundred or so people in such thrall, they had obeyed him with such alacrity, surely I would be mobbed if my phone so much as vibrated. I decided the only way I could save myself in such a situation would be to curse it, throw it on the ground and stomp on it until it shattered. Such is the power of Buckland’s acting.

Fortunately, the alluring rectangular curse remained dumb during Buckland’s enthralling performance in Unruly, and was soon forgotten as he pulled us into the formerly disparaged primatologist’s story and how he came to be here, talking to us in the midst of dramatic events that had neighbour pitted against neighbour, spouse against spouse, child against parent, human against baboon.

But Buckland was not Dr Rob Campbell for long. Soon he was a former head of a private security company, sniping ‘babs’ in the bush with a souped-up paint gun. Then he was a lefty baboon lover, a reactionary supporter of culling programmes, a woke student. He did the rounds, became a baboon for a while, too. Very convincingly. But these are just characters in the story Rob Campbell tells. The story he cannot help himself telling.

He tells us of his wife, Sonia, who played the double bass, and thereafter lifts it up, the only prop on stage other than a mask and chair, and passes it to Chantal Willie-Petersen sitting seemingly as one of the on-stage audience members. Through this modest sleight of hand, Willie-Peterson both represents Sonia and provides a soundtrack that is, through bass strings alone, in turn soothing and rousing, placid and unsettling, and always alluring.

There is a canonical thread in Buckland delivering an astounding performance as a reluctant town hall lecturer. About a decade ago in Tobacco, and the Harmful Effects Thereof, he was Ivan Ivanovich Nyukhinin in Will Harding’s adaptation of Anton Chekov’s one-act play.

There are no fall-backs employed here, though, just an echo of the type few actors have the longevity, and the memorability, to create.

And unlike Ivan, who was exotic to us, and a clown, Rob Campbell is serious and immediately recognisable, especially, probably, to Capetonians, and even more so to those of us who live south of the lentil curtain. It is the actor’s genius to amalgamate characteristics in order to create someone we’ve met, or seen, or heard before, and then use that character to lead us on a dream-like journey we would simply not allow outside the theatre, unless we suffered from madness, or psilocybin. The other characters, too, are ones we have met. I bumped into a few of them at a march for the protection of the baboons, which happened to take place the next day in Simon’s Town, where this play is loosely set (it could also be Scarborough, or Kommetjie – Rob Campbell does mention sitting on his stoep and watching the sun set, and the fictitious Skemer Baai provides a geographical clue).

There is deep research behind this play, for which production company Empatheatre has made themselves known. For two years or so, Empatheatre director Neil Coppen and designer Dylan McGarry, along with Buckland – who are all co-writers – have dug into the issues surrounding human-baboon interaction and the urban interface in Cape Town, and spoken to people from across the spectrum of opinion. Buckland has performed the play free-of-charge in municipal halls and public spaces during various of its development phases, and held long, in-depth discussions with the audiences afterwards to gain further insight.

What we see now at the Baxter is the culmination of all this work, and it is spectacular. There is no proselytising, just storytelling, of the kind that may have held our ancestors in thrall around the fire, perhaps tripping on mushrooms or some sort of cacti.

In this sense, Buckland, in this performance, is shamanic, in that he leads us to discover, or rediscover, what it is to be connected to the world, and to each other.

Music score by Braam DuToit, lighting design by Tina le Roux, set and costumes by Dylan McGarry and set and costumes by McGarry. Photo credit: Retha Ferguson

Unruly is on at the Baxter Studio until 2 August. Bookings and details here.

Addendum (23 July, 21:39): Tina le Roux’s superb lighting deserves a review of its own, particularly given the technical difficulties of working on what is a combination of a thrust stage and in-the-round, where it is all too easy to blind someone sitting on the other side.