This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

14th June 2008

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About a year ago, in one of the cavernous Grahamstown school halls used as theatre venues at the National Arts Festival, I discovered Jacques Brel. Of course, I’d heard of Brel before, and knew some of the popular versions of his songs: “If We Only Have Love”, “Jackie”, or the more saccharine renditions of “Seasons in the Sun”. But it was only when I attended a performance of Kissed by Brel, watching and listening in awe as Claire Watling (accompanied on the piano by Godfrey Johnson) brought Brel’s lyrics and melodies to life, that I realised quite how remarkable a poet and musician he was.

Since then, in the rare moments that urban noise and the myriad soundtracks of modernity have receded into the background, one of Brel’s tunes has risen to the surface of my consciousness – and always in Watling’s voice. I’m continually surprised by this phenomenon, and I still haven’t quite figured out if it was Brel or Watling who made such a deep impression. So you can imagine my ambivalence when I found out that a “sequel” of sorts, Kissed by Brel Too, was on the way: what if, as is so often the case with sequels, it didn’t match up to the original?

I needn’t have worried. Not only is the show, directed once again by Geoffrey Hyland, as carefully nuanced (both musically and choreographically) as its predecessor; it’s also sufficiently different to make comparisons inappropriate. The key and obvious difference is that, in Brel Too, Watling is joined by Brian Heydenrych, who is well established on the South African stage and TV scene.

Although many of Brel’s songs employ a lonely, melancholic and often nostalgic “I”, there are also numerous pieces written on behalf of a communal “we” – friends, lovers, a generation, a country, occasionally even all of humanity. Watling has joked about the difficulty of “singing to a chair” in Kissed by Brel, but her interaction with Heydenrych in this production gives the relationships (however fractured) that are so crucial to Brel’s musical repertoire both a visual and a vocal substance.

The tight harmonies, synchronised movements and exchanged glances of the duets also lend themselves to emphasising, by way of contrast, the mood of absence and longing that dominates many of the solo numbers. Moreover, if Watling’s great achievement in Kissed by Brel was to capture the “two faces” of Jacques Brel – simultaneously joyful, exuberant, even manic, and mournful, wry, even cynical – then the advantage of Watling and Heydenrych performing together is that these complex shifts in mood can be explored further.

In “Marathon”, for example, the ironic conflation of a light musical tone with descriptions of often-tragic historical events mocks and bemoans the twentieth-century tendency to dance blindly through decades of suffering. The duo perform Eric Blau and Mort Shuman’s English translation of the song, in which the twenties (“Black black Monday and the market drops, / But we keep on dancing, dancing, we can’t stop”) give way to the thirties (“Adolf Hitler and the Siegfried follies / Joseph Stalin and a bag full of jollies”); then “the forties burn”, “the fifties zing”, “the sixties swing”, “the seventies flash”, “the eighties bang”, “the nineties whimper and the century hangs”.

Brel’s vivid character portraits shine. There are the fools in and out of love: the stood-up beau waiting in vain for “Madeleine”, the cuckold who rues his love affair with “Fanette” and the dupe who can’t wait to have his heart broken again by “Mathilde”. There are the vulnerable figures: “Timid Frieda” who quickly finds out about life on the street and, in “Next”, the young soldier who loses his virginity in an army-sponsored trip to a brothel. And there are the pseudo-intellectuals, “The Early Morning Hangers-On” for whom Brel had no patience: “At Midnight they begin to talk / of poems they haven’t read / of novels they’ll never write / of lovers that they’ve never had / of great truths they’ve never known.”

As in Kissed by Brel, most of the songs are performed in the English translations of Blau and Shuman, Arnold Johnston, Brian Rogers or Rod McKuen. Eloquent, witty and – importantly – accessible as these are, purists claim that the “authentic” Brel can only be found in the French and Flemish in which the lyrics were first composed. Certainly, Brel’s nationality and linguistic-cultural affiliation is central in his musical oeuvre, with numerous songs castigating his Belgian compatriots, celebrating the Flanders landscapes or recalling “the time when Brussels was king ... when Brussels brustled”. Kissed by Brel Too acknowledges this: the rousing bilingual finale “My Open Land” (“Mijn Vlakke Land”/“Le Plat Pays”) gestures towards the song’s Belgian origins without alienating the audience.

The same is true of “Marieke”, one of three favourites preserved in the repertoire from Kissed by Brel. Like “Song of the Old Lovers” and “If You Go Away” (“Ne Me Quitte Pas”), “Marieke” has been reworked for this production. Again, it stands out – Johnson’s accompaniment is fevered, and Watling’s voice almost cries out the desperate sehnsucht of the lyrics.

The show runs at the Montecasino Theatre until 29th June.