National Arts Festival, Grahamstown 2007, Part Seven: Interview with Andrew Buckland

Andrew-Buckland-interview
This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

14th July 2007

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For many ‘festinos’, no National Arts Festival is complete without a performance by Andrew Buckland. He has, after all, been at the annual event since the early 1980s, and it has been the launch pad for some of his most memorable plays. This year, he starred in two new shows (Voetsak! and Crapshoot) and was writer-director of a third (Love Amongst the Bones). 

On the penultimate day of the festival, I meet up with Buckland and his wife Janet – also a veteran of the South African theatre scene – at the Rat & Parrot, the pub that somehow functions as the Lodestone Rock of social life in Grahamstown. We talk about the evolution of Voetsak!, which Buckland considers “a real baby” that  still needs to be developed further. As with many of his shows, it has grown out of a single image: in this case, that of “an old woman walking with a box on her back, and a guy in the box, and the relationship between them.” In Voetsak!, the old woman is a dummy, with Buckland playing the ‘ventriloquist’, who is in turn an autonomous character. During the course of the play, he changes from a simple assistant trying to distribute ‘food sacks’ among the needy to a militant-capitalist tyrant telling them to “voetsak!” and, ultimately, to an overturned dictator on the run (which is how he ends up in the box).

The play is, from one point of view, about the impossibility of socialism and the inevitability of violence, totalitarianism.and corruption; yet it is also funny – very funny at times – and affirms the survival of individuals despite political turmoil. For Buckland, it is about “the interdependence of the manipulator and the puppet, and how that relates to the weird interdependence between perpetrator and victim. How do they get on without each other?” This was stimulated by his involvement in last year’s Truth in Translation, which revisited the trauma of the TRC. Buckland was particularly struck by stories about victims of torture who developed bizarre ‘friendships’ with their torturers.

Crapshoot is altogether different from Voetsak!: it’s an experimental piece in which Buckland teams up with Ric van Heerden and his mutinous Random Planet jazz quartet in a kind of ‘rehearsed improvisation’, a curious mix of music, mime and deadpan comedy. Yet the two shows have much in common: Crapshoot also demonstrates a reflexiveness on Buckland’s part about his experience as an actor (he mocks the conventions of one-man shows, such as playing two or more imagined characters or bumping into an “invisible wall”); a flair for the absurd (singing a blues song about “vegetable abuse”); a slapstick sensibility (acting out the scatological complexities of insurance contracts); and a seamless transition from the personal to the political (such as his depiction of “liar-fighting”, where combatants use both generic untruths – “the check’s in the mail” – and specifically South African deceptions – “HIV doesn’t cause AIDS” – to injure each other).

Love Amongst the Bones is performed by the UBOM! Eastern Cape Drama Company. Part murder mystery, part socio-economic commentary, it is set in Grahamstown and pivots around the role of the ‘scavenger’ who finds a use for other people’s rubbish. “The scavenger gets a view into your world through what you throw away. I wanted to use that subversively as a reaction against consumer culture, in which things are designed to be bought and discarded. The central character in Love Amongst the Bones just throws anything that’s a nuisance away. If he had an ageing mother, he’d put her in a home. We can’t deal with ‘rubbish’; if there are things in our lives that we don’t like, we get rid of them as quickly as possible. But it’s important to acknowledge our responsibility for rubbish and to look at the minutiae at the bottom of the heap. We like to pretend that they’re not there, to look at the flowers but ignore the worms underneath.”

Of course, Buckland has long been interested in ‘muck’, the unpleasant and unhygienic and dirty. Fuse, which he performed with his son Daniel and Mongi Mthombeni in 2004, immersed audiences in the world of rats; and, of course, his landmark 1988 piece The Ugly Noo-Noo (directed by Janet) confronted the horrors of the Parktown Prawn. The latter piece explored the climate of fear in South Africa in the dying days of apartheid: a fear that invoked taboos, the things we don’t talk about because, if we did, they would become real and therefore threatening. Nowadays, notes Andrew, the “planetary wolves” of globalisation enact a taboo over the reality of widespread poverty and encourage our denialism about global warming: things we don’t want to see because then we’d have to change our lifestyles.

On this point, Janet comments that Daniel’s stage adaptation of the children’s book Eco-Wolf and the Three Pigs is one of the few pieces at the festival that foregrounds the problematic interaction between humans and the environment. (Daniel also features in the well-received black comedy Dr Collinger’s Funeral Service, which Janet is directing. We joke about the ‘family business’ of theatre: “It’s a different kind of life,” she admits. “You work odd hours. So I’m not surprised, but very glad, that our children got involved; theatre’s an all-consuming thing.” Andrew quips, “Why do you think we’ve got so few friends?”)

I mention the ensemble work in Love Amongst the Bones and the inventive use of black plastic bags as props – representing ties, curtains, electric gates, chairs, scanners, jewellery – that developed out of the workshopping process. “The UBOM! team is very strong; they have a great deal of respect for each other,” says Andrew. “That’s the useful side of having a permanent company,” notes Janet, who created UBOM! to fill the void of professional theatre in the Eastern Cape resulting from the days when CAPAB served the whole province: “Professional theatre was discouraged, because the ‘pros’ came from Cape Town. Even though we’ve had Fugard and the Serpent Players, they’re long gone. Amateur dramatics flourishes, but there’s been no real theatre industry. We wanted to say to actors, ‘You can earn your living in the arts, you can work in professional theatre’, and to audiences, ‘This is more than The Bold and the Beautiful, the arts is something worth spending money on’. So when we tour to ‘take theatre to the people’, we try to generate an interest in paying to see a show, even if it’s only 50c or R1.”

The Bucklands’ love for the Eastern Cape has manifested itself in a number of plays based on the history of the region, including last year’s Kiss my Boot (about Xhosa chief Maqoma) and Makana (about the famous prophet). They were students at Rhodes University together and, after a number of years in Johannesburg, they returned to Grahamstown when Andrew took up a teaching post in the Drama department (he is now Professor Buckland). I ask if he experiences a disjunction between academia and theatre practice. “In a way, I really can’t consider myself an academic,” he replies. “I don’t perform research at the level of a professor. But currently there’s a big shift towards looking at practice as research: the practical nature of my work is recognised as the equivalent of giving a paper or publishing an article.”

Moreover, for eleven of his years at Rhodes he was a full-time teacher. I suggest to him that a number of the outstanding one-man performances by young actors at the festival in 2007 – Scott Sparrow in Performer’s Travel Guide, for instance, or Tim Redpath in Prodigal – show the marks of his influence: a difficult-to-define style, combining elements of physical theatre with careful storytelling, the ability to portray various characters through subtle gestures, facial expressions or accents; an impeccable sense of timing and an easy rapport with the audience; and a blend of outrageous comedy with darker elements of fantasy or tragedy.

“Ja, a lot of people try and blame me for that ...” he jokes, although he is very serious about the power of the physical “not just as a tool for performance, but as a medium of performance”; this stems from his training in classical mime, which he considers a “distilled form of physical theatre”. Janet adds: “The body can conjure up the most unbelievable emotions and paint the most colourful landscapes. It’s ‘poor theatre’, which is an old tradition.” Andrew agrees that “the heightened physical style, playing different characters, the economy of theatricality – they have been there for years, around the world” and insists that, before The Ugly Noo-Noo in 1988, Barney Simon and Percy Mtwa had already done something similar in Woza Albert. Before them, there was Gibson Kente.

“But when Lionel Newton and I did it [in, for example, The Well Being], a lot of people got excited. It’s the magic of mime. You engage the audience’s imagination. They can’t just sit there, they’ve got to be involved.” Buckland and Newton have collaborated on numerous projects through Mouthpeace, the production company they share with Lara Foot-Newton. Janet admits that “People have sneered at the style. But it is a huge tool in a multicultural society, where the physicality can transcend language barriers. With classical, text-heavy theatre, you cut out half the population! With this style, you appeal across cultures. It’s an act of reconciliation. It reaches everybody.”

Andrew concurs: “Changing characters embodies the very notion of transformation – personal and social. I can play two conflicting emotions or ideas in myself. That’s a powerful thing.” We talk about the potential for stereotyping when actors ‘cross the colour line’; “For a long time,” notes Buckland, “if a white person was playing a black person, the character would be stupid or a caricature. The performance itself was racist. But when you play a person by acknowledging how they speak and who they are, creating a whole believable character, there’s nothing stereotypical about it.”
 
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