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| Flying Solo at the NAF |
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 18th July 2009 Actors who put on one-man and one-woman shows at this year’s National Arts Festival variously described the experience as “exhausting”, “risky”, “gratifying”, “challenging” and “terrifying”. Interacting physically, verbally and psychologically with other performers requires no less skill, energy or acuity than ‘going solo’. Nevertheless, holding an audience’s attention when alone onstage is a particularly daunting test of an actor’s ability. In truth, the actor is never alone; he or she may be the only one in the spotlight, but there is always a technical crew somewhere in the darkness. And while the idea of the auteur is appealing – the artist as all-controlling writer/director/designer/actor of a work – memorable solo shows often result from creative partnerships and collaborations. Take, for instance, Gaetan Schmid’s Rumpsteak. Set in a French restaurant, Rumpsteak boasts a delightful set of characters – including the stern chef and his hapless kitchen assistants, the longsuffering Maître D’, the flirty waitress, the drunken waiter, the camp pâtissier and Johnny, the out-of-place South African busboy – between whom Schmid segues with aplomb. The play’s ‘dialogue’ is almost all in French, but you don’t have to know the language to understand the action – instead, the story is revealed through mime sequences that are perfectly synchronised with a soundscape designed by sound artist James Webb. As an opening ringside-style announcement and music from the film Rocky suggest, the show is an elaborate ‘boxing match’ between Schmid (words and movement) and Webb (sound effects). Rumpsteak is a comedy and doesn’t take this metaphor too seriously – one of the characters played by Schmid is a butcher named Rocky who has a predilection for a cow called Adrienne – but, if the metaphor were to be extended, one could say that the roles of referee and trainer are combined in the person of Rob van Vuuren, who directs the show. As an actor, Van Vuuren has been twinned with various other performers (such as Louw Venter, in The Most Amazing Show). Recently, however, he has also established himself as a solo funnyman with the stand-up-comedy-meets-thespian-memoir Rob van Vuuren is Ron van Wuren, which had Grahamstown audience members falling off their seats with laughter at this year’s Festival and which is now heading to Johannesburg. James Cairns is another of those who has previously teamed up with Van Vuuren – in Brother Number, they played a pair of siblings trying to escape the stifling confines of a Home Affairs building. Cairns’s one-man shows, such as Rat and The Sitting Man, have developed a loyal following over the years (as was evidenced by the full houses for his revival of The Sitting Man at the 2009 Festival). He is a master at what theatre jargonists call ‘inhabiting a character’: beyond simply imitating accents, duplicating speech patterns or having recourse to signature gestures, in The Sitting Man Cairns presents a range of South Africans from across the country’s geographical and cultural divides, through acute attention to details of vocal timbre and mannerism. In doing so, he forges a disturbing narrative in which a mysterious package passes hands from violent criminals to innocent bystanders, exposing the grim underbelly of South African society. Cairns’s popularity at the Festival was hard-earned – he performed in two shows almost every day. In addition to The Sitting Man, he joined Toni Morkel, Deborah Da Cruz and Roberto Pombo in Jenine Collocott’s touching love-and-loss story High Diving. Offering a nuanced take on the ‘boy meets girl’ archetype, High Diving makes evocative use of silhouettes and shadow puppets (created by Jani Younge) to offer a dreamy – or nightmarish – commentary on Johannesburg and its symbols, such as the potent but gloomy Ponte skyscraper. If Rob van Vuuren is Ron van Wuren could only ever be realised by the title character, then can The Sitting Man be imagined without James Cairns, or Rumpsteak without Gaetan Schmid? One of the problems with the proliferation of talented solo performers in South Africa is that their plays are transient phenomena – often, they are not fully scripted; they may not be readily transferable from one performer to another. Of course, alongside artistic concerns, there are financial imperatives that influence the Festival’s burgeoning number of Fringe shows: the smaller the cast, the higher the share of revenue from ticket sales. Moreover, when cost is a consideration, devising a new show is cheaper than paying for the rights to perform a published playscript. Two actors at the 2009 Festival, however, gave bravura one-woman renditions of well-known texts. Nina Lucy Wylde recreated Jean Cocteau’s portrait of a spurned woman pining for her former lover over the telephone in The Human Voice (La Voix Humaine); and Jennifer Steyn, in one of numerous productions at this year’s Festival adapting literary works to the stage, brought a surprisingly tender James Joyce text to life in Molly Bloom. Molly is the wife of Leopold Bloom, the bumbling everyman ‘hero’ of Joyce’s lengthy tome Ulysses. In the final section of the book, lying in bed next to her snoring husband, she muses over her marriage, her lovers, her body, her children and other topics. Steyn gives a (heavily accented, but finely tuned) voice to Joyce’s creation as the author treats some of his favourite themes: a visceral emphasis on bodily functions and sexuality; ruptured parent-child relationships; the unreliability of memory; anxiety about Irish identity and a distrust of nationalism. Joyce was a mentor to compatriot and fellow-émigré Samuel Beckett, and many of Beckett’s works revisit these themes – creating an unexpected resonance between Molly Bloom and Conor Lovett’s dramatisation of Beckett’s novella First Love, which was one of the highlights of the Festival. With the convoluted syntax, frequent asides, non-sequiturs, second-guessing and self-contradiction of its narrating voice, Beckett’s book lends itself to theatrical monologue. Lovett’s version enhances Beckett’s mordant and morbid sense of humour – the narrator of First Love hangs around in graveyards – without softening his underlying tone of desperation, his disgust with the physical frailty of human beings or his fears about the fundamental irreconcilability of men and women. Yet these productions also demonstrate the value of intimate partnerships in making ‘solo’ shows: Lovett is directed by his wife, Judy Hegarty; Steyn by her husband, Nicky Rebelo; and Wylde by her mother, Ingrid.
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