STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS
HERE is a scene in the film Wonderwerkerwhen any fan of local actors simply goes: “Wow”. Cobus Rossouw, Sandra Kotzé, Dawid Minnaar, Marius Weyers and Elize Cawood are sitting on the stoep, talking on a hot, still afternoon about this and that.
South African acting history in the making right there, for all to appreciate.
It has been a while since we saw Rossouw and Kotzé on screen together – they agreed to work with Katinka Heyns simply for the chance to work with the director who hasn’t made a film in 14 years.
While both are semi-retired (they met in theatre in 1965) they’ve also agreed to return to the boards for Marthinus Basson’s staging of the Aardklop-commissioned Kind Hamlet.
Rossouw played Hamlet 40 years ago under the direction of Robert Mohr, a performance still held up as seminal to acting students.
Not only is it one of the most sought-after roles for male actors, but Hamlet is also a play that has seen countless adaptations and retellings; the perfect mirror for politics and society at any given time.
Basson’s staging sees the couple coach two younger actors through the intricacies of playing the Dane, turning the Shakespearean tragedy into a docu-drama about the state of the local acting scene.
At the HB Thom Theatre in Stellenbosch I catch a glimpse of rehearsals, sitting in on a scene where Kotzé is running Ludwig Binge through his paces (Roelof Storm rounds out the cast), coaching him not to ham up the scene.
Earlier that afternoon I sat down with Rossouw and Kotzé and picked their brains about translations, working together and arts festivals.
Working together is as simple as breathing for these two – both have directed each other in plays, worked together behind the scenes for the Swaruk (Namibian performing arts council) and Sukov (Orange Free State performance arts council) and she describes them as “a two-man ensemble”.
Learning to separate self and character in their professional lives has taught them valuable lessons about separating work and home life.
TKotzé is known for her translation work on stage plays, such as Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongema. She got started in this field when a translator dropped out of a play she was working on, and both hold up Uys Krige’s translations of The Bard’s works into Afrikaans as the best, especially his work on Twaalfde Nag ( Twelfth Night).
She recounts listening to a radio commentator after that play first debuted: “He said: ‘I just want to tell you I went to see a play last night and it was wonderful. It was so funny. It actually needs to be translated into English’.”
Rossouw explained that Basson’s original intention was to mount Hamlet in its original entirety for Aardklop, but the usual problems of funding and time cropped up, so they used their years of experience to workshop something new and manageable.
They play different characters in extracts of the play, then step back to discuss their roles and the theatre industry.
“We talk about the theatre, and we talk to the young people and hear what their problems are and they want to know how our life was, and especially Cobus’ life because he’s been there for ever,” says Kotzé.
“We talk to the audience as well, don’t we Sandy?” Rossouw gently interrupts her.
She draws on one particular example during rehearsals when they took issue with the younger actors’ pronunciation of a particular word.
“Then we got into a whole discussion about how speech has changed, how Afrikaans and English… it’s sort of causing another way of speech. They’re not so careful anymore, they mix languages.
“It’s not easy because we must be careful not to seem to be two old people, telling others what to do and how to do it,” she said.
“I don’t mind that at all, there is such a thing as standard Afrikaans,” he rebuts.
In Kind Hamlet they talk about how local arts festivals are growing, but actual theatre spaces are being neglected, the vacuum created by closing down performance art councils and how TV sucked up all the experienced actors into doing background work such as scriptwriting.
Kotzé worked as the manager of Afrikaans TV dramas for the SABC during the 1980s and helped Franz Marx launch Egoli in the 1990s.
Meanwhile, Rossouw was seen in TVseries such as Lied van die Lappop and, more recently, Feast of the Uninvited. He’s been in several films – from Die Kandidaat (1968) to the recent Wonderwerker – but still prefers stage work: “The best work I’ve done is definitely on stage. Working with a live audience, that marvellous thing, the relationship you have with the audience.”
Though, he admits, working with someone like Jans Rautenbach was quite an exciting and enjoyable experience as well.
“Young people today have to go it on their own, they have no shoulders to stand on,” said Kotzé.
Kind Hamlet belies that statement.
TEATERteater presents Kind Hamlet at the Aardklop Theatre Festival in Potchefstroom until Saturday.
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