Deep rivers permeate SA play
INTERNATIONALPLAYWRIGHT Yael Farber is having a fantastic time in Toronto, Canada. The Joburg-born theatre director has found her little spots to do what she does and is enchanted by her four-year-old, but she misses SA.
“It’s a special city, but it’s not home,” she said in an interview at the Baxter Theatre.
She was in Cape Town last week to cast a new adaption of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, which will be called Mies Julie (restitutions of body and soil), commissioned by the Baxter Theatre in association with the National Arts Festival.
As head of the directing programme at the National School for Theatre in Canada and the resident playwright for Nightwood Theatre in Toronto she has a regular outlet for doing what she does best: “I am grateful that in Montreal I’ve got those outlets where I can bring what I do, which is very South African.
“Even if I’m working with the students, and they’re Canadian, they feel how we just bring something else.
“We bring an intensity, an immediacy, an urgency of storytelling. I know the effect that I have out of context on people, where they get a sense of where I come from,” explained Farber.
While so many theatre makers complain about the lack of funding and support Farber says that privation certainly teaches SA creators how to make do with almost nothing: “So you go to the heart of what theatre really is.”
“The other thing is, because we’re a society so much in flux there’s such an urgency about community, about really getting each other and telling what happened and what will happen and what’s to come.
“You have to be coherent and urgent and vital and outstanding.”
“In societies where theatre has become a thing to examine in itself, they do a lot of work where there’s deconstruction of form. So it’ll be another version of Chekhov’s The Seagull, but that is an interesting exercise in and of itself for them.
“What we have is ‘who are these characters in The Seagull and why does it matter? ‘ and you can make it matter. But, the point is it doesn’t become an exercise where we are all gazing at the form, we need stories told and I’m driven by that.”
While she could have come up with something new, she chose to adapt Miss Julie because she loves “to springboard out of the expectations of the audience.”
“When they know it’s an adaptation they come expecting something particular, which they did with Molora, which was my adaptation of the Oresteia... and then I love to mess with that.
“I love that we’re part of such a powerful inherited legacy as theatre makers. We belong to this weird oral and written tradition. We inherit stories and it’s mine and I’m going to mess with it.”
She’s been happy about the “stunningly exciting” actors who auditioned and will come back in mid-may to spend winter in Cape Town to create the play which they’re hoping to take to the Edinburgh Festival.
For her “directing means illuminating the story in such a way that the audience feels its potency” and while there’s nothing shocking about the mixed couple in Miss Julie, there’s something much more complex that she wants to explore.
“What I’m interested in is the much deeper rivers that run underneath the text, where you’ve got all the complications of what it means to be South African.
“A lot of these plaas kids grow up together, so I’m setting it probably in the Karoo... certainly in some conservative stronghold.
“Miss Julie has grown up, as these kids do, amongst the children of the labourers and then what happens...
“I’m changing the role of Christine, who is John’s girlfriend, probably into John’s mother because I think there’s something very dynamic going on between mothers and sons right now. How are those sons accountable to their mothers?
“I’m interested in exploring the darker currents like Miss Julie’s entitlement on the land, but who owns that land? To open up the debate about the body as a metaphor for the political body.”
“I want to work in very strong symbols with a kind of minimalism that brings a potency. It’s not about going into some deep psychoanalysis of the characters, I’m interested in what’s urgent in SA right now. What’s the tension about ownership and power and sexuality, about mothers.
“I’m interested in that dynamic of, if John’s mother is the domestic worker on the farm, but she’s raised Miss Julie, these displaced equations of mothers who have to leave their own children...”
“I want to concentrate it all into this little kitchen. I think the kitchens of SA are like the heartbeat of where everything happens.
“I’ll never forget that metaphor from Antjie Krog in Country of My Skull where these women went to get ID’S for the first time and they had no fingerprints because they’d rubbed them away from work.”