This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

7th July 2007

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Kissed by Brel: Not just a tribute show

Each year at the National Arts Festival, a host of singers and bands descend on venues such as the Centrestage (otherwise known as the Grahamstown Bowling Club and Scout Hall) to perform tributes to musical greats from the Bee Gees to Bob Marley, and contemporary favourites from Jack Johnson to Josh Groban. These are always popular routines, with audience numbers swelled by nostalgia and, later in the evenings, alcohol.

It’s difficult to write about them without entering into age-old debates about ‘high art’ and ‘popular culture’. Some festival-goers turn their noses up at these shows – talented though their performers undoubtedly are – while others have no interest in the ‘serious’ theatrical, musical and artistic enterprises on display. Chacun à son gout, as the French say: each to his own taste.

One thing that can be said, however, is that while much of the light entertainment at the festival is forgotten within a day or a week, there are certain productions that transfix their audiences and leave a lasting impression.

Such a piece is Claire Watling and Godfrey Johnson’s Kissed by Brel, a “theatrical cabaret” demonstrating the musical genius of Jacques Brel. It would not be appropriate to call this a ‘tribute show’ – for it is far more than mere imitation. Indeed, it pays Brel the ultimate tribute of performing his songs in a unique and original way. Brel’s songs have been sung by such luminaries as Nina Simone, Marlene Dietrich and Shirley Bassey, but Watling’s renditions (accompanied by Johnson on the piano) must surely stand alongside these.

Her stage presence demands the acute attention of the audience to every gesture of hand and face, and the modulations of her voice are exquisite. The opening number, ‘Carousel’, moves from a childlike playfulness to a crazy carnivalesque mood, and to the sense of isolation and loss that is the constant undertone to Brel’s lyrics and song. This combination of humour and pathos is sustained in subsequent pieces, from the self-mocking ‘The Middle Class’ to the hopeful ‘If We Only Have Love’. There can be few audience members who, having heard Watling belt out ‘Marieke’ or ‘Amsterdam’, will think about Flanders or the port-and-prostitute city in the same way again.

In the performance that I watched, Watling further demonstrated her virtuosity when, after losing the microphone to a technical hitch, she continued nonchalantly as if she hadn’t needed one all along.