This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

26th January 2008

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In Mirror, Mirror – the latest stage offering from Mike van Graan – the author of Bafana Republic turns his satirical gaze from the World Cup in 2010 to the medieval world circa 1020. The play is “set in a time of queens, knights and revolting peasants”, but this element of historical fantasy merely provides a framework for a story that is actually about South Africa.

Although it is a funny show, Mirror, Mirror could make for rather depressing viewing if you’re one of those people who like to think that the arrow of time always flies forward to better and greater things (and that history is simply a way of explaining how contemporary global society became so enlightened compared to previous centuries). The play not only affirms that apartheid South Africa closely reflected the living conditions and power structures of feudal Europe – the very rich and the very poor, with not so much as a thread of justice bridging the two – it also suggests that what many people in this country experience post-apartheid is as bad, if not worse than, the socio-political and economic difficulties faced during the twentieth century.

This is, of course, a problematic assertion; there is a well-established debate over the associations of ‘modernity’ in South Africa. Some have claimed that apartheid, based on strict social control and racial pseudo-science, was (like Nazism and Fascism) one of the ultimate manifestations of modernity. Others, like Tony Morphet, believe that it is only from a ‘white’ point of view that apartheid can be aligned with North Atlantic forms of modernity in the twentieth century. For black people, apartheid was rather “the devastating experience of being thrust back by coercive force into the conditions of the pre-modern world”, and thus “their grasp of the meaning of modernity is bold and uncompromising: freedom”.

When I put this issue to van Graan, he places it in the context of a “clash of cultures”, suggesting that an anthropological approach is needed when trying to understand political models and their success or failure. (For instance, he observes, the tensions in KwaZulu-Natal between the ANC and the IFP in the 1980s and 90s were “cultural” not simply in terms of ethnic difference but in terms of political culture – a feudal or patriarchal culture confronting a democratic culture.) “Organisations such as UNESCO have started to realise that you can’t just ‘sort out’ a country by ensuring democratic government and a free market economy. In terms of ‘modernity’, we’ve seen that it doesn’t work to impose western models and espouse what is deemed to be the most advanced form of society but is itself rooted in certain paradigms. South Africa has pursued particular models – such as free enterprise – because we want to be affirmed in certain parts of the world where those models are esteemed. But it has backfired in terms of reducing poverty.”

The compact symbolism of Mirror, Mirror reflects a “clash of cultures” of a different sort. At one point in the play, which is primarily concerned with the role of the artist, the shift from so-called elitist (and apartheid government funded) Eurocentric art forms to more populist (and post-apartheid government funded) Afrocentric expressions is indicated as the same troupe of performers segues from Swan Lake to Shosholoza.

Van Graan, who worked as advisor to the Ministry of Arts and Culture but became disillusioned by poor policy implementation, distrusts the “superficial rainbowism” that has been used to paper over the cracks in democratic South Africa. “It’s an understandable political imperative, given the strong divisions of the past. Apartheid was premised on the idea that, because South Africans were culturally different, they had to be segregated. So there is value in building a unified national culture.” But it is equally necessary to ridicule attempts to create a monoculture that is “engineered to give the impression that we are all one” when, economically and otherwise, we are not.

At the same time, Van Graan notes that in recent years “we have seen people support the arts in apartheid form”: separate linguistic (English, Afrikaans) or racial (coloured, Indian) communities attending the kind of theatre in which they can “watch themselves” onstage. This is equally undesirable. Although Van Graan acknowledges that “we need to be humble about what theatre can achieve” – it might reflect the lives of the majority to the upper-middle class minority, as happened under apartheid, but it does not speak to a wide audience – the multi-racial young cast of Mirror, Mirror facilitates the play’s critiques of almost every sector of society.

It could be argued that the neat symmetry in the racial composition of the cast (four black actors and four white actors) helps the politically hyper-correct viewer to laugh at the way in which the play exposes the foibles of both black and white South Africans without fearing accusations of racism. But this talented group, all recent graduates of the UCT Drama School, insist on their generation’s liberation from apartheid categorisations.

Emily Child and Tamarin McGinley, who play Queen Amanda (representing the apartheid government) and her servant Nimrod, maintain that those who grew up post-1994 “don’t mind about jokes that use race or accent”, which makes characterisation “less problematic” because the members of the cast are comfortable with one another’s diverse backgrounds. For Peggy Tunyiswa, who plays a much-beleaguered newsreader and a money-grubbing opera singer, “You can’t say that there are elements of racism [when the play criticises the ANC government] because we’re just depicting what’s happening out there.”

Certainly, the politics of this generation differ from those of their parents. Pakamisa Zwedala and Sibongile Balfour play ‘Number 1’ and ‘Number 2’, or Mbeki and Zuma; Balfour is the daughter of a certain cabinet minister, while Zwedala is the son of a high-profile diplomat (both of these political luminaries, it must be said, have apparently been very supportive of their respective children’s involvement). But while being young may liberate an artist from apartheid-era obsessions, it can also curtail his or her historical awareness. As I listen to Van Graan and the cast discussing the play, it emerges that some of the actors feel there is an imbalance between the ‘lighter’ first half, set during apartheid, and the ‘heavier’ second half, which deals with contemporary events; Van Graan suggests that this is because they didn’t actually experience apartheid as adults.

When the play opens, Artimir the jester-figure (Andrew Laubscher) has been placed in the stocks for criticising the Queen – an image with a deep resonance for writers who were jailed or whose works were banned during the struggle. Van Graan bemoans the way in which the arts in South Africa have moved from courageous protest pre-1990 to conformity and self-censorship post-1994. It’s not appropriate to ask “What are we going to write about now that the struggle is over?” when there are new struggles against various social injustices. Nor is it enough to stage revivals of anti-apartheid plays, which Van Graan categorises as “the theatre of nostalgia” (Mirror, Mirror mocks the tendency to reprise the apartheid-was-bad-and-democracy-is-good truism by presenting a group called REPEAT: The Revolutionary People’s Entertainment Arts Troupe).

He insists that “the responsibility of the artist is always the same, it’s just the conditions that change”. It seems that, for Van Graan, in South Africa today this responsibility entails an oppositional stance – one unlikely to meet with the approval of ANC ideologues. But that’s as it should be, he says; after all, “it’s not the role of the playwright to be popular”.