Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Empty nest drama haunts viewers
collaborations are the Fugard’s production of Florian Zeller’s play The Father, directed by Greg Karvellas, its companion piece, The Mother, directed by Honeyman (it runs until March 4), films by Olwagen, a Standard Bank Artist of the Year in 2015 ( Johnny is nie dood nie, and Kanarie, co-written by Olwagen and the Fugard’s musical director, Charl-Johan Lingenfelder), and the upcoming Fugard production of So Ry Miss Daisy.
The Zeller plays arguably reveal their partnership at its best.
Zeller, born in 1979, and winner of the the prestigious Prix Interallié in 2004 for his novel La Fascination du Pire ( Fascination of Evil), along with several Moliere Awards for his plays, is pitched as the man of the moment in theatre, the most widely repeated judgment being The Guardian’s estimation that he is “the most exciting new theatre writer of our time”.
The complexity of the plays – The Father and The Mother – presented challenges, Pool said, that were at once taxing and rewarding.
He preferred new works, because conceiving of the setting was “unemcumbered” by tradition.
Yet, in the case of The Father, this didn’t necessarily make the task any easier.
Pool said: “I knew the first time I read the play that I didn’t want to go ‘realistic’.” There was also the difficulty of using a stage space that would not allow for elaborate scene-changes.
“But, other than that, the real ‘space’ that the play takes place in is the main char- acter’s mind.”
He went through 15 different versions of the set before settling on a solution he felt was “outrageous”, and wasn’t confident director Greg Karvellas would like. Fortunately, he did.
The principal device, besides three pieces of furniture, and a bed at the end of the play, was a series of slightly opaque polycarbonate screens that could be moved across the stage to reveal the main character’s creeping dementia.
The pair’s co-designed set for The Mother uses screens in a different way – in part as surfaces for projecting the thoughts of the tormented subject, but also to reveal to the audience her obsessive eavesdropping on the not-clearly-visible or easily mistaken goings-on around her.
It often seems than an almost fated obscurity attends the behind-the-scenes artistry of staging.
Yet, at a time when, in Pool’s estimation, the “hyper- reality” everywhere evident in television and film had made stage realism “redundant”, the conception of the stage setting had become a core feature of the drama, rather than merely a plausible vehicle for the action, verisimilitude so believable that a lounge on the stage could seem like a lounge you might comfortably inhabit.
“It wasn’t always like that,” he said. “People today are very aware of sitting in the auditorium of a theatre, where they see the lights and they see all the devices. Realism bores them. They want to be challenged.”
And this, Le Roux and Pool believed, was one of the things that made the “thriving” theatre scene exciting.