This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

19th July 2008

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The dichotomy between page and stage may be a false one, but it is a common enough assumption (albeit unconscious) that the literary text implies a reader-writer dynamic, while the theatrical production depends on an actor-audience relationship, and never the twain shall meet.

The ancient Greeks – as with so many other things – had it right: they used the same word, poet, to describe Homer and Euripides, Orpheus and Aeschylus. Of course, the irony here is that legendary or mythical figures like Homer and Orpheus were poets in the oral tradition, while playwrights like Euripides and Aeschylus committed their dramatic creations to paper (many of which were lost in the fires that destroyed the great library of Alexandria).

The playscript, then, is a contested meeting-ground between literature and theatre. Ben Jonson made it clear that he wanted his plays to be read by the general public; he also endorsed the publication of Shakespeare’s plays, which resulted in centuries of ‘Shakespeare’ being distributed in book form as a kind of British cultural capital. It wasn’t until relatively recently that a renewed emphasis on performance has rescued Shakespeare from the pages of the Collected Works and put him back on stage and screen – although many unfortunate school pupils continue to read Shakespeare plays without ever seeing or hearing them.

Shakespeare is the most obvious historical example of the fraught affiliation between ‘literature’ and ‘drama’, but the list is a long one: made longer, of course, by the thousands of films produced in the last few decades that are based on novels and short stories (“adapt or die”, they say; and that certainly is true of many a Hollywood screenplay writer).

At this year’s National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, however, there were numerous theatre productions demonstrating the ways in which literary text and dramatic performance are complementary art forms.

Performers are under no obligation to be ‘faithful’ to the texts they adapt: the South African Ballet Theatre’s version of Don Quixote, for instance, extracts only a handful of scenes from Cervantes’ epic novel, but a corps de ballet is expected to delight an audience visually rather than to provide a coherent narrative. Other productions, however, were rich and sophisticated adaptations that brought books to life on stage.

Emily Child and Luke Ellenbogen’s Gone Dotty is an astute interpretation of Dorothy Parker’s short stories. Parker is best known for her dry wit – the kind of thing we all wish we could say when trying to impress friends at cocktail parties (“One more drink and I’ll be under the host”; “Brevity is the soul of lingerie”). But she was first and foremost a writer, and many of her more quotable quotes are taken from her poems and prose.

In Gone Dotty, grainy film clips of Child (as Parker) cavorting on the beach or at the horse races are interspersed throughout the show, both evoking a sense of period – Parker rose to prominence in the 1920s and 1930s – and immersing us in the slightly manic world of a New York or Hollywood socialite. It was this world, with its endless round of dinner-and-dancing, of gossip, of frivolous women and dull men, that Parker satirised so relentlessly even as she became one of its favourites.

The female characters who narrate the stories portrayed in Gone Dotty are versions of the author; they are, by turns, obsessed with finding happiness through men (the narrator in “The Telephone Call” is desperate to start a romance, while the protagonist of “The Taxi” is mourning the end of a relationship) and utterly dismissive of the second rate males they encounter (in “The Dinner Party”).

Child’s performance captures the frustrations of these bright, eloquent women, as well as their insecurities and their neuroses. They share a penchant for self-mocking melodrama and sardonic gloom (“Life is the longest distance between two points ... the hay hung from the nose of a tired donkey”). Despite the abundant humour, there is an undertone of gloom; Parker did, after all, attempt to commit suicide on several occasions.

South Africa has not produced a Dorothy Parker, but we have had our fair share of tragically suicidal writers. In recent years, promising young writers such as K. Sello Duiker have taken their own lives, leaving behind texts that give some insight into their suffering – such as Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams, an adaptation of which ran on the Main Festival programme in 2008.

One of the most haunting literary suicides in South Africa was, of course, Ingrid Jonker. It is Jonker’s poetry that provides the backbone of Why We Left, an English-Afrikaans bilingual production directed by Megan Godsell. Belinda Belseck and Nicholas Welch play a young couple who have emigrated from South Africa to a country in the colder climes of the northern hemisphere, presumably the UK, to make a fresh start after suffering a traumatic loss.

Both husband and wife are lovers of poetry, and they are so well-versed – admittedly, improbably so – that they resort to communicating with each other through the lines of poetry they have memorised. Sometimes they deliberately quote stanzas to each other; at other times, they unconsciously express themselves in the words of their favourite poems. Breyten Breytenbach also makes an appearance, and there are snatches of Robert Frost, ee cummings (whom Jonker herself translated into Afrikaans) and others. Belseck and Welch move fluently between the two languages, and the play is a fascinating exercise in what is lost and gained in the process of translation.

Why We Left is a quiet, understated piece of theatre that relishes the compact but suggestive language of poetic expression. An interesting and probably unintended by-product of the show is to endorse the critics of South African ‘white’ poetry who chastise both English and Afrikaans poets for focusing on “veld and vlei” (or flora and fauna) to the exclusion of the country’s social and political context. Belseck’s character is desperately homesick but, as with many ex-pats, what she misses most is not the people of South Africa but the land and the climate: the sunshine, the indigenous flowers, the endless vistas. This is reflected, by and large, in the poetry that she quotes.

That said, the lyricism of her deep need for the sight, smell and feel of fynbos, cosmos and strelitzias matches Caron Bosman’s evocative and ingenious set design. The claustrophobic British bedsit in which the couple live is slowly transformed into an imagined forest of South African plants and trees – the landscape of the troubled young woman’s mind.

By contrast, the barren topography of PB Shelley’s famous sonnet, “Ozymandias”, is reproduced in a physical theatre collaboration of the same title that also debuted at the Festival. Shelley’s poem describes the fragments of a statue lying in the desert (the remains of a once-great empire and its vain king), emphasising the classical motif of sic transit gloria mundi: thus passes the glory of the world.

Gary Gordon and Acty Tang of the First Physical Theatre Company have joined forces with John Allen and colleagues from the New Orleans-based John/Allen Project to produce a dance piece that moves the spotlight away from “the eroded sculpture of the arrogant Pharoah” and towards the “traveller from an antique land” who, in Shelley’s poem, relates the encounter with the fallen statue: “that lone migrant in a forlorn landscape, staring at the ironic remains of human ambition, all the more ironic because the traveller has tasted the devastations that propelled him into migration.”

This seems, at first, a somewhat contrived connection. What do Romantic poetry and the current global problem of forced migration have in common? During the course of the production, however, film projections of the participants’ personal testimonies make the link explicit.

Imperial expansion or colonisation is arguably the root cause of diasporic fragmentation – one nation’s territorial conquest is another nation’s decimation. America, we are reminded, is the current dominant empire; one that will, by implication, presumably collapse. Its warmongering and economic interventions have aggravated the conditions in what we now call “the developing world” that were first created by a centuries-long European colonial project.

Yet the USA’s neglect of its own citizens has resulted in a kind of internal migration – most obviously, the displaced former inhabitants of New Orleans. This is emphasised as the American company members share their experiences of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, with projected images reminding us of the destruction caused.

In the first part of this ‘danced’ Ozymandias, titled “Building and Leaving”, the performers manipulate a grid of square frames, making and dismantling structures in fluid movements. The second part, “The Fetish of Memory”, critiques our dependence on material goods and possessions – not simply because we are greedy, but because we need tangible objects to help us remember our past and affirm our identity. These personal totems serve a similar purpose to public monuments, which commemorate a collective past and affirm a shared (although often artificially created) identity.

Ultimately, however, these objects and monuments will sink under the “lone and level sands” of the desert described in Shelley’s poem; and, as Ozymandias reaches its finale, sand dominates the dancers onstage.