Taking in Maynardville during the dog days of summer
Afternoon temperatures across SA are hovering at the 35ºC mark. February is always a sultry month here; we associate it with tantrums in parliament, increased stress for farmers, and red-hot panic in company offices as the financial year-end approaches.
Driving around in my stifling car, cursing the broken air conditioning, I find some respite in an old-school CD audiobook. Michael Palin’s Erebus: The Story of a Ship is an account of the nautical adventures of HMS Erebus, which was employed for polar exploration in both Arctic and Antarctic seas. The conditions Palin describes — frigid seas, icebergs and snow — were miserable for the poor old sailors, but seem blissfully cool to an overheating South African.
I had no such comfort as I dashed around Cape Town in a rented vehicle last week, trying to make my way to the opening of Abri de Swardt’s Kammakamma at Field Station, an arts space in the Green Point Park precinct. I was late, arriving sweating and in a foul mood. But within a few seconds, I was drawn into the bizarre and vivid world unfolding before me in a two-channel video projection.
Kammakamma is part of a long-term project in which De Swardt explores the physical bounds and the metaphorical permutations of the Eerste River
— so named by Simon van der Stel, as he considered it the first river beyond the small settlement of Kaapstad. De
Swardt’s title points to other, lost names, through “the Khoekhoe language terms for water (//amma) and similitude (khama), with ‘kamma’ absorbed into Afrikaans to mean ‘make believe’.”
The Eerste River traces a course from the beauty of the Jonkershoek valley, via the wealth of Stellenbosch, to the low-income community of Macassar. It meets an unglamorous end, emptying into False Bay between a waste water treatment plant and the munitions factory of Denel. No wonder, then, that De Swardt sees the river “as a source of shifting stories, and as a saturation point for understanding the effects of climate and catastrophe”.
In the short film being screened at Field Station, De Swardt and her collaborators bring back to life the figure of Hendrik Biebouw, seen by the Dutch colonial authorities as a drunken good-for-nothing adolescent but recorded in history as the first white man to call himself an “Africaander”. Evocatively portrayed by Ben Albertyn, this Biebouw straddles three centuries as he splashes madly through the water. The ruff around his neck is a Kreepy Krawly suction disk, and he seems to express himself both in early modern Dutch and in Afrikaans.
There is a scatological and syntax-bending poetry to his derangement, voicing a youthful disdain for the corrupt and selfenriching Van der Stels of both then and now. He is almost a settler-colonial Caliban, protesting against the powers that lord it over him; when he demands, “Give us teens some land!”, this places him very squarely in contemporary SA political discourse.
From Green Point, I drove around the mountain to Wynberg, where VR Theatrical’s Romeo and Juliet (directed by Geoffrey Hyland) is being staged as the centrepiece of the Maynardville Open-Air Festival. The heat of the day had passed, but the memory of it lingered — which suited the play perfectly.
One of the main changes Shakespeare made to his source material was to shift the setting from winter to summer, immersing his characters in the “dog days” of an Italian July and August. We all know of Romeo and Juliet as star-crossed lovers, but Shakespeare scholar Sophie Chiari notes that there is a very specific star invoked in the play. It is Sirius, Canis Majoris, the Dog Star.
Soon after Sirius made its appearance in the northern hemisphere’s night sky, all kinds of social ills were bound to follow: sexual licentiousness; anger and violence; and public health crises (outbreaks of plague). Keeping this association in mind helps to explain much of the behaviour we see in Romeo and Juliet. Everyone is impulsive, choleric, rash, unnecessarily confrontational or cruel.
In this somewhat shortened version of the text, the action is compressed and tempers boil over even sooner. The beautiful young lovers never have a chance in climate-anxious, civil war-torn Verona. It is very much a 21st-century tale.