This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

14th March 2009

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The last time Fiona Ramsay and Robert Whitehead were on stage together, Ramsay tells me with a wink, I probably wasn’t even born yet. I’m quick to reassure her that when Michael Frayn’s play Benefactors arrived in South Africa a few years after it opened in London in 1984, I was very much alive and kicking. But her point is well made: although they have collaborated on various projects and have directed one another, it’s been many years since they actually performed together.

Their reunion heads a stellar cast in a production of Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be, opening at the Joburg Theatre Complex (formerly the Civic Theatre). Award-winning actors Michael Richard, Malcolm Terry, Harry Sideropoulos and Mike Huff are also part of this unusual revival.

Fings was a West End hit in the early 1960s; described by Joan Littlewood, the show’s first director, as “a play with songs and music” rather than a musical per se, it boasts a score and lyrics by Lionel Bart (who went on to create Oliver!, as well as pop songs like Cliff Richard’s ‘Living Doll’ and the James Bond theme ‘From Russia with Love’).

The script was penned by ex-convict Frank Norman, and it tells of a world that Norman knew well: the low-life milieu of cockney London in the 1950s, where Fred Cochrane (Whitehead) runs a shpieler, or illegal gambling den, with the help of his companion Lil (Ramsay). Their cohort consists largely of prostitutes, pimps, petty thieves and policemen on the take – a motley group that Ramsay says is “like a family”: “They support each other, although now and then someone pinches something from someone else.”

No doubt many audience members will be intrigued to see Whitehead’s transition from the gruff, mean criminal figure of Isidingo’s Barker Haines to a comical, singing small-time crook. But comparatively few are aware of the distinguished stage career – encompassing comedy, drama, revues and even opera – that preceded his iconic status on the small screen. “It’s only old geysers of a certain age who know that I’ve done theatre!” he jokes.

I ask him if that generational divide amongst those who follow his career is frustrating. Whitehead is phlegmatic: “It’s inevitable. Although, of course, when it comes to TV, the divide between viewers’ ages isn’t so great; Isidingo has a wide following. But the theatre-going population in any country is always 0.00-something percent.”

Ramsay points out that, outside of community or student theatre, there’s also a large correlation between people who have an interest in – and can afford – theatre, and people who have DSTV. “So not many theatre-goers are au fait with local television. But,” she notes, “when I was in the Richtersveld some time ago, everyone who saw me in the shops recognised me from my roles in [SABC TV series] Justice for All and Hard Copy. So you have different audiences. We don’t – can’t – have the kind of ‘star system’ they have in America. Even if you consider TV alone, viewers are divided between channels, by language and culture. That’s one difficulty with being an actor in SA.”

Ramsay’s stage career now spans four decades, since she founded the Troupe Theatre Company with Richard E. Grant, Fred Abrahamse and others in 1978. She still produces a show under this banner “every year or two, but it’s difficult to get funding unless you’re attached to a particular community-based project; and no-one wants to give funding to an old white hag!”

She may be self-deprecating regarding her age – when I mention her highly acclaimed recent roles as the ‘wicked’ old Mrs Meers in Thoroughly Modern Millie and the wretched Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, she bemoans that “It’s that time of my life, darling!” – Ramsay shows no sign of slowing down. “Theatre has always been considered the poor relative among the arts, but I love it! It’s like oxygen to me. Film and TV are great, but not as immediate. And you have to compromise more.”

Whitehead concurs: “Theatre’s the real stuff. And this show in particular is helluva demanding, the hardest thing I’ve done since Waiting for Godot. There are no monologues, there are always crises happening onstage, and you’ve constantly got to be aware of who’s around you. Everybody’s trying to realise their character, but sometimes you’ve got two words on one page. You’re listening to everything else, listening as your character would, but sometimes you can get distracted and think, ooh yes, that is a lovely piece of furniture!”

Ramsay, whose character is “constantly cleaning and dusting”, considers the production as “a lot like cabaret. You’re using all your faculties, but there’s no linear story to the piece. Little vignettes; slices of life. It’s not like Monday night is followed by Tuesday morning.”

Whitehead interjects, “We often don’t know where we are, in fact!”

Ramsay gives the example of “a wonderful moment in the play when Sergeant Collins arrives in the shpieler and says ‘Morning all!’ and then, three lines later, asks, ‘You’re not gambling this evening?’ It’s unlike anything I’ve done recently.” There are elements of stand-up comedy, of vaudeville, even of farce – slamming doors and plenty of coming and going as the cast of seventeen criss-crosses the stage.

Having a company this size is unusual in itself, as Ramsay explains: “The trend in recent years has been to have either big musicals – spectacles, with huge casts – or one- and two-person shows. What’s exciting is that, if Fings works, the Fringe space will be used to revive other classics and musicals that have disappeared. We’ve got no real cabaret venues, places where you can do risky stuff. That’s what I like about Fings, the risk element. It’s not safe.”

This is part of the broader vision of Joburg Theatre Complex CEO Bernard Jay, who is also executive producer of Fings and who – based on a passion dating back to his own first encounter with the play in a small London theatre – has invested in a show that may not be as commercially successful as other productions he previously brought to the Civic.

A further peril, for both Ramsay and Whitehead, is that audiences often have very specific ideas about which roles actors ‘ought’ to be playing; this is, in turn, related to casting trends. “Years ago, if you were going to play Cleopatra, you’d dye your hair or wear a wig. Nowadays you have to actually look like Cleopatra. Similarly, if there’s a character with a wooden leg and one tooth, agents can find an actor who has a wooden leg and one tooth. It’s also more personality-driven. So it’s difficult to break with type. If you’re seen as glamorous, you’re expected to be glamorous in every part. People who see me do cabaret are surprised when they see me do Shakespeare, and vice versa. So it’s a risk. I always find it amusing that certain audiences expect certain kinds of performance from you.”

Is there also a risk that SA audiences will find it difficult to follow the cockney rhyming slang or to relate to the characters and setting? Ramsay endorses director David Bowles’s observation that – quite apart from the fact that even the original production programme contained a glossary for non-cockney Londoners – British people today would not necessarily be able to follow the dialect and pop culture references of the 1950s because the slang is constantly evolving. “No-one says, ‘I’m going up the apples’ any more [Apples and Pears = Stairs]! There’s a real sense of period, and we’ve worked hard to make it authentic. We have our hears tuned in as closely together as possible. The cockney accent is just so specific,” admits Ramsay, who specialises as an ‘accent coach’ through her Speakeasy Vocal Academy.

Bowles has also asked (and answered) the unavoidable question about the ‘relevance’ of this show to SA audiences. Is it accessible? For Bowles, there is a key point of comparison between the England of Fings – fifteen years after World War Two, with food shortages and other privations a recent memory even as growing wealth ushered in new kinds of music, like Rock’n’Roll, and other novel forms of popular culture – and SA’s own ongoing ‘transition’.

Ramsay offers a light-hearted addition, “There’s also police corruption...” and Whitehead joins in: “Bent coppers, villains, whores and tarts!”

More earnestly, however, Ramsay argues that “People often think that stuff coming from abroad – ‘the West’ – is beyond our ken, or elitist; Fings isn’t that at all. It was a revolution against drawing-room comedy and tra-la-la behaviour. The characters speak a kind of tsotsi-taal equivalent; the shpieler is almost like a shebeen.”

The interest of the piece is, of course, its particularity in place and time. Whitehead is “less and less convinced about localising foreign products. If it’s worth a damn, it’s universal anyway.” Nevertheless, there are connections to SA’s theatrical tradition. The nature of the production reminds these two theatre veterans of Gibson Kente’s depictions of Soweto, or the ways in which workshopping productions became the modus operandi of so many theatre practitioners who didn’t have access to theatre scripts because of the cultural boycott.

“Fings was developed in precisely that workshop style. It was groundbreaking then; it could be groundbreaking in SA now,” affirms Ramsay.

* Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be is on at the Fringe (Joburg Theatre) until 3rd May.