Our columnist Calland captures
A new play by a new playwright explores shenanigans in South Africa’s politics
Barrister for seven years at the London Bar before moving to South Africa in 1994 to work on its founding democratic election as an adviser to the ANC in the Western Cape; University of Cape Town law professor; adviser to the governments of Mali, Peru, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Jamaica; political analyst; columnist for the Mail & Guardian since 2001 and author. Richard Calland can now, at the age of 59, add “playwright” to his CV.
He is wearing a grey cap with the logo of his beloved Arsenal on it, and a matching sweater, during our Zoom call because Cape Town’s weather has gone into autumn mode.
“I always felt that maybe I had a play in me,” he says when I ask where the idea for the new Market Theatre production The Brothers, Number One and a Weekend Special comes from.
It goes back to when he was growing up in London. His schoolteacher father was always prudent with money and never in debt.
“But he basically spent every single penny of his disposable income on the arts, on culture. He was addicted to the theatre and to opera.
“It was his hobby and he was quite hedonistic in that sense. He really loved the pleasures of art and culture. And he would drag me along.”
Calland loved going to the theatre with his old man, even into teenagehood, with all its distractions.
“But there were times when, at the opera on a Saturday night, I’d be like, ‘Can you please now die, so we can get home in time for Match of the Day?’ Because watching football was still a priority for me. But, in general, I really enjoyed the experience.”
The play tells the story of state capture, which started with the announcement of a new finance minister, one Des van Rooyen (the “Weekend Special” in the title, who was in office for a mere weekend) in late 2015.
It tracks a two-year history of corruption involving The Brothers — the Guptas, an influential family with close ties to the South African government — and “Number One”, then president Jacob Zuma.
The play opens on Friday 26 April, on the eve of the 30th anniversary of South Africa’s democracy when, for the first time, all the country’s people went to the polls on 27 April 1994.
When Calland started writing the play in 2019, the story in his head was the Bell Pottinger scandal that was exposed in 2016 and 2017. It followed Zuma’s appointment of Van Rooyen, a little-known backbencher, to one of the most powerful positions in government on 9 December 2015. It was earth-shattering.
“People were saying, ‘I think he’s an MP, isn’t he? Is he from the North West?’” Calland recalls in our interview. “They had literally never heard of this guy and he’s now been appointed as the minister of finance. That was incredible.”
He says that was a massive overreach on Zuma’s part.
“I think his downfall can be tracked back to that moment.
“Of course, as he began to fall, he got more desperate and he tried to do things. One of the things he did, through the Guptas, was to bring in [British communications company] Bell Pottinger to try and spin his way out of trouble and to mask what was going on with this — very clever, actually — campaign of misinformation about what was going on in the country.”
Calland was sitting at a little coffee shop in Berlin, Germany, around the corner from his son’s crèche. “And I just opened up my laptop and I started writing this play.
“I had in my mind a vision that one half would be set in an office in the Union Buildings. And the other half would be set in an office at Bell Pottinger in London.
“And I could imagine the scene change between the two sets in my head. And I could imagine the main characters.
“I just started writing and, to my great delight, it flowed. But it was, at that point, entirely a hobby. I mean, I was just having fun with it.
“It really wasn’t with any expectation that it would go anywhere beyond my laptop.”
The Brothers, Number One and a Weekend Special could have taken the predictable route and featured the Guptas, Zuma and Van Rooyen as per the title — South Africa has enough fine actors to play those roles.
But Calland’s play cleverly stars six characters metres away from these sources of power: “Uncle” could be based on Mac Maharaj who was Zuma’s official spokesperson; the slimy spindoctor Tim Bell and his sidekick “Virginia”, based on the powerful Bell Pottinger MD Victoria Geoghegan; Zuma’s rogue legal adviser Michael Hulley; “The Journalist” — a thinly disguised Ranjeni Munusamy, who was embedded in the Zuma camp, and “Tiger Claws” — Phumzile van Damme, the opposition MP who carried the campaign against Bell Pottinger.
I went to watch a preview on Sunday afternoon. Under the Market Theatre’s artistic director, Greg Homann, actors David Dennis, Michael Richard and Zane Meas lead the cast, alongside Astrid Braaf, Ziaphora Dakile and Melissa Haiden, bring the high drama of the time to life on stage.
I ask Calland how much dramatic licence they used.
“So, Tim Bell, I’d say probably 50% of his words are actual Tim Bell words. And mainly from Richard Poplak’s documentary Influence.
“Bell was amazing in that documentary. I guess he was sort of demob, de-life happy — he knew he was dying; he was close to the end, chain-smoking through the interview.
“And he was obviously just in a garrulous mood and he just talked and he didn’t hold back. And … so there were some great lines there and then the rest I just made up from my imagination as to what would fit for him.”
Calland says the other five characters are all fiction.