Your last chance to judge whether Van Graan’s Green Man Flashing is a classic
What is a classic? Poet and literary critic TS Eliot asked this question in a lecture of that title, delivered in 1944 to the recently formed Virgil Society in London. You can guess the answer: Virgil, the poet laureate of ancient Rome, is the one, the only, the urclassic to whom all subsequent writers must defer.
Half a century later JM Coetzee borrowed Eliot’s question for an essay, which started by expressing bemusement that at the height of the Second World War Eliot paid no attention to the great catastrophe: from the perspective of a Virgil enthusiast “the war is only a hiccup, however massive, in the life of Europe”.
Coetzee, though sceptical of the ways in which Eliot’s configuration of the western literary tradition was part of an “attempt to give a certain historical backing to a radically conservative political
programme for Europe”, also had to acknowledge that he (like Eliot) was drawn to Europe’s “classics” from a young age because they were a means of escape from the provincial backwater he called home.
This was Worcester, SA, in the early years of apartheid. Coetzee’s vexed relationship with the country of his birth is well documented, but it has never been entirely clear if he
grew out of this sense of inferiority to the metropolitan West or if he still he thinks of SA as bereft of “classics”.
It suits ambitious writers to bemoan how the literary terrain in which they find themselves lacks classics: they are able to stake a claim, to produce the missing classic texts, as Coetzee has arguably done. It was not only white writers who, largely unaware of the work of their black compatriots — and entire languages, cultures and traditions outside of their frame of reference — felt the 20th century “colonial cringe”.
Black writers, too, wrestled with the question of “local classics”. Nat Nakasa’s literary magazine, The Classic, founded in 1963, lasted only for a few issues but has since acquired “classic” standing.
A classic can be a work that represents a particular historical moment, or that departs radically from the context in which it was produced. It may have been popular, influential and commercially successful, or it may have been unrecognised in its time. It may be a staple of educational curricula, diligently studied but unloved, or its appeal may lie in its marginal,
cult-like status. As with literature, so with the visual and performing arts. The only real means of achieving consensus on classics is the passage of time. Does the work last, and does it continue to speak in new ways to new generations?
Theatre aficionados might rattle off a list of apartheid-era classics: King Kong, The Island, Woza Albert. But what of the post-apartheid stage? Can a play only 10 or 20 years old be labelled a “classic”? What of new works? A review bestowing the moniker “instant classic” can be the kiss of death.
When Mike van Graan’s Green Man Flashing debuted at the National Arts Festival in 2004, critics were in effusive agreement: this was a “groundbreaking” play that got to the very “heart and soul” of SA’s democracy and its demons. Over the next two years it was staged in various cities and secured the rank of at least a “minor classic”.
And then it more or less disappeared. Green Man Flashing has been a common point of reference in accounts of post-apartheid theatre, but it has not been on stage as often as this ostensible centrality might suggest. Perhaps this is because Van Graan has penned many works since then. Perhaps anxieties over audience appetite, especially in cities like Johannesburg, have militated against re-staging.
The play makes a welcome return to Gauteng in a new production at the Auto & General Theatre on the Square in Sandton. The tangled Mbekiera knot of political intrigue and sexual violence that it depicts unquestionably speaks in new ways to our tentative postZuma moment. Is it a classic? Judge for yourself, but hurry — it closes this weekend.