Words speak louder than actions
ACTOR Craig Morris met director Greig Coetzee back when the latter directed the former for a corporate gig, but they really hit it off a little later in Grahamstown.
Morris approached Coetzee to direct him in an adaptation of Troy Blacklaws’s novel, Blood Orange, around the same time that Coetzee was wowing everyone with Johnny Boskak is Feeling Funny at the National Arts Festival almost a decade ago.
“That adaptation took about six months of to-ing and fro-ing with Greig and Troy, who was overseas, and myself. The three of us kept on e-mailing backwards and forwards and putting it on the boards took about three weeks. By then we’d spent a lot of time on the text and knew where we were going.
“In that process already Greig had been saying he would love me to do one of his shows because of the unique physical interpretation I bring to work. Blood Orange was a very word-heavy script and the words are very evocative, very image dense,” Morris remembered.
Coetzee suggested that Morris could simply sit on a chair on stage and read it, “but I insisted there’s another language in the body that just adds another level of reading for the audience.
“We had been playing with various of his pieces, but Johnny Boskak is Feeling Funny intrigued my wife the most. She had done some work with the text with kids at school and really got it, she understood this character Johnny better than I did. She just said: ‘You need to wait, you’re not ready to do it yet.’”
Three years ago, Morris e-mailed Coetzee and said he wanted to do Johnny Boskak, but they needed to wait a bit, and this year “we just went for it. So, the piece has been on the boil for a long time.”
Because of the text’s rhyming scheme, Morris says the huge amount of words is easier to remember “because you kind of know what’s coming next. Because it rhymes, it informs what precedes it.”
The original text has been edited slightly, since he added some still moments of pure physical storytelling and calls this restaging the dark urban drama a process of reduction: “It’s important for those floods of words to come, but then it’s also important in terms of the staging and music of the piece, to sometimes have those moments of stillness when the audience can let those words sit with them for a while.
“You can’t just pull something out, it might make the pentameter fall apart, so we had to be meticulous about that, to allow the moments of physical storytelling to also have their place.”
Watching Morris help the stage crew strike the set after a performance of Johnny Boskak at the Cape Town Fringe Festival, it became apparent that the one thing on stage besides Morris, the road barrier, was really heavy and not a plastic make-shift prop.
“In my head I was jumping around like a crazy person, doing this piece, but early on (director) Ros (Wood-Morris) said: ‘No, the words are doing it. The words are the sparks, the fireworks. You need to be the anchor, the stillpoint around which all of this moves. Yes, you have moments of dramatic animation and dynamic motion, but it’s the words that are doing all of that, swimming around in the spaces in their heads’.
“The whole piece is about keeping it still, holding position. So the barrier
RENSBURG became part of that. It’s this heavy object that sits there and at some point the audience becomes aware that it is the real thing and it just anchors the space. The whole story is a dynamic narrative which shifts all over the place, but it’s the barrier and Johnny in his stillness that anchors the whole thing.”
Currently performing Johnny Boskak is Feeling Funny at the Cape Town Fringe Festival, Morris also introduces Capetonians to Blood Orange.
Then Johnny Boskak goes to the So Solo Festival which runs till October 11 Craig Morris thinks Blood Orange has a very Cape Town feel to it: “A large number of the set pieces, the moments, happen in Cape Town. The quintessential olfactory, sensual moments in the writing are so evocative of Cape Town. “It feels like, sometimes, it’s wasted on other audiences because their only other references may be when they come on holiday here,” said Morris. The play is the story of Gecko, a boy who has an out-of-synch way of seeing the world and the title references his school days in the Cape, where the Simonsberg drinks the “blood orange” sun at dusk. But it’s never played to Capetonians. “I have family who live in Cape Town who have come to see the show and like every capetonian in the audience, they all say it should come down to Cape Town. “A lot of it is a bit of a love poem to Cape Town, the way it expresses the pastiches that are Cape Town. There’s the high street in Paarl, and he ends up on conscription in Oudtshoorn, he meets his first love in Muizenberg. The whole story ends with a mermaid swimming across to Robben Island to ferry Mandela across the Bay. It’s constantly evoking these palettes of Cape Town.” at Wits, after which it comes back to the Kalk Bay Theatre in Cape Town at the start of November and he hopes to take it to the Musho Festival in Durban next year.
Morris is also working with Khutjo Bakunzie-Green under the direction of Allan Kolski Horwitz on Boytjie & Girlie: The politics of a partnership. The workin-progress could possible run at Afda or a smaller venue, next month.
The Cape Town Fringe Festival ends Sunday at the City Hall and other venues around town.