A very strange world …
Sparse, powerfully acted play brings the lives of anti-apartheid activist couple to the stage
Even before the lights at The Market Theatre were dimmed for the play to start, the songs playing were subtly transporting us to Durban in 1963 where The Unlikely Secret Agent is set.
First, the typical 1950s closeharmony hit Mr Sandman by The Chordettes floats us back through the decades, followed by the Rolling Stones’ 19th Nervous Breakdown and Patsy Cline’s Crazy, both hinting at the unsettling places the story was going to take us.
As interval starts, another excellent choice — the South African protest song from the 1960s Master Jack by Four Jacks and a Jill — its lyrics, “it’s a strange, strange world we live in”, so true and relevant.
During the show, Miriam Makeba’s commanding musical warning, Beware, Verwoerd! (Ndodemnyama) had the same effect.
Directed and written by awardwinning actor, director and playwright Paul du Toit, The Unlikely Secret Agent tells the story of Eleanor, an unassuming young single mother who works at Giggs Bookstore in Durban.
It is a paranoid time in Verwoerd’s apartheid republic. The police’s notorious Security Branch are on the hunt for Eleanor’s lover, who is in the banned ANC. He is the activist and — depending on who’s asking, telling or interrogating you — the “terrorist” “Red” Ronnie Kasrils.
It is a love story and a political thriller but with enough humour to counter the darkness and depravity of the interrogation scenes.
Eleanor, powerfully played by the exceptional Erika Breytenbachmarais, is getting more deeply and directly involved in the underground struggle against the apartheid state.
And it is very dramatic. There is the destruction of electricity pylons near Pinetown that shrouds Durban in darkness, the bombing of the Central Post Office and an explosion at the Security Branch offices in the city’s Baker Street.
“Am I a terrorist?” she asks Kasrils. “No, a secret agent,” replies the delightfully cast Wessel Pretorius. He even has similar bushy eyebrows to the real man and good Joburg boykie accent to boot.
The communist Kasrils, ironically enough, worked at the ad agency Lintas at the time.
“I’m a contradiction,” the character says knowingly, because “I have a way with words.”
But the fine young actor does not only shine in the Ronnie role. Dressed in dark suits, Pretorius, with Sanda Shandu, Ntlanhla Kutu and De Klerk Oelofse, play a range of challenging characters with aplomb.
In one scene, they camp it up as a bunch of white liberals mouthing typical white liberal platitudes.
Next, they are spooked ANC underground activists on the run; in a later scene they are inmates in the mental institution where Eleanor manages to get herself incarcerated as part of her plan to escape.
Kutu is truly believable as a Zulu woman who works in the institution as a cleaner and who helps Eleanor to freedom.
But the best — or is it the worst? —is when the foursome play the menacing Security Branch cops who have detained Eleanor.
Though she comes under intense pressure during interrogation, Eleanor has her own secret to conceal. As a clandestine agent for the underground ANC, she must protect her handlers and Kasrils at all costs.
They obsess about Kasrils being a Jew and a communist. They also do the good-cop, bad-cop schtick, because they are cops, after all: “Do you realise he’s using you?” and “You’re better than that — you’re a Christian,” versus “It’s just a matter of time before your boyfriend takes a bullet,” and “You’re a fucking waste of a white skin!”
Outstanding is the moustached Oelofse who, to chilling effect, plays the notorious Lieutenant Grobler [see sidebar], a brooding baby-faced believer in the apartheid cause; one with a volcanic temper and a proclivity for sexual abuse — it becomes almost unwatchably tense when the other police officers leave him alone in the detention cell to “deal” with Eleanor.
As counterpoint, his colleague, Major Steenkamp (played suavely by Shandu) does the smoother “good cop” afterwards and explains: “His questioning can, shall we say, sometimes be a bit robust …”
The sparseness of the stage — bordered with just a filing cabinet, a desk and four chairs in a row for the four Security Branch men — enhances the drama. The focus is on the phenomenal actors, with efficient, pinpoint lighting and limited, but effective, sound effects augmenting only when necessary.
Right at the end, visuals are projected on the wall to tie it all up, including celebrating Eleanor Kasrils, who died on 8 November 2009 at the age of 73, after a long life in pursuit of justice for all South Africa’s people.
The Unlikely Secret Agent runs until 2 June at The Market Theatre in Johannesburg.