This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

16th June 2007

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Alan Committie and Rob van Vuuren are two very busy men. Van Vuuren is appearing nightly at Cape Town’s Kalk Bay Theatre in Brother Number, a new two-hander written and performed with James Cairns, while on weekend mornings he teams up with The Most Amazing Show partner Louw Venter for “Corne and Twakkie’s Breakfast Bonanza”; as performers, directors or co-producers, he and Venter are involved in no fewer than six shows at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in July. Committie manages to visit his Cape Town home once in a while, but these days he is mostly in Johannesburg, where his take on Rob Becker’s Defending the Caveman and his own one-man show Stressed to Kill have been sell-out successes; in between all this he is bringing out a DVD of the antics of Johan van der Walt, the bumbling security officer who most people would recognise from his cameos on TV show Laugh Out Loud.

Last month, Committie and Van Vuuren took a break from their other commitments to play the title roles in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which ran at UCT’s Little Theatre. Committie had long wanted to produce the play in South Africa, but the large number of actors required was prohibitive – in the local theatre industry, the cost of salaries for a large cast is not economically viable for independent producers. A collaboration with the UCT drama department (which Committie hopes will be repeated annually) gave a number of students the opportunity to be involved in a professional production and allowed Committie and Van Vuuren – who have spent most of their careers in one- or two-man shows – to revel in the delights of ensemble work. When we meet to discuss the play after it has finished its run, Committie bemoans that, “after having such fun doing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern”, returning to solo work was tough: “I’ve never felt so lonely in a dressing room! At interval especially. My own shows don’t have an interval, but Caveman has one for 20 minutes. Even if it’s going very well, you have no one to talk to and no one to tell. So I start looking through my phone ...”

Van Vuuren agrees that “doing R&G was incredibly liberating”: “We’re very aware that we’ve built up our separate comic brands and have created our own work, and we’re in a privileged position, doing exactly what we want to do. But we’re also actors, and in the comedy industry there aren’t many parts where there is a ‘fourth wall’ and you can just get into the role and playing the rhythms of the text – a text you didn’t have to write. Some other genius did it, and now you have to make it work.” Having said that, Van Vuuren does embrace “the package deal” of writing, directing, acting and producing: “I always knew I wanted to act, but quite naturally turned to directing and writing because that’s the nature of the system – if I want to put on shows, I must write them. Also, different mediums interest me; I’ve had a passion for theatre from a young age but also loved movies, loved TV. It’s that auteur thing: if you really want to make your own work, no matter what it is, you’ve got to be able to try your hand at different mediums and art forms.”

For instance, Van Vuuren is turning The Electric Juju, one of his solo shows, into a graphic novel with artwork by Venter. “Corne and Twakkie has given us a fantastic opportunity to write and direct our own movie, but it’s also opening up avenues for directing other types of movies and writing other scripts, or producing other plays and work with other actors. That’s very exciting – there’s so much scope.”

We talk about branding and the difficulties of putting on a show like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when the two leads have independent followings, audiences that have come to expect a certain type of entertainment. Van Vuuren emphasises the difficulty he and Venter have in managing “two different brands” under the TMAS production banner: “Corne and Twakkie is pure comedy, often a completely different audience to shows like Electric Juju or Out of Time [Venter’s show]. It’s a huge exercise in brand management – the more you do it, the more you realise that you’ve got to pitch shows to the right people, let people know what to expect ... or just trick them.”

I suggest that this “trick” is good for South African theatre; that Corne and Twakkie works like a healthy gateway drug, bringing in audiences to more serious or emotive or darker shows performed by Van Vuuren and Venter, the kind of work that those people wouldn’t otherwise see. Nevertheless, Committie notes, they tried to avoid pushing their own brands in the press releases for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (which offers not only light comedy but also profound metaphysical reflection, and presents some quite disturbing existential dilemmas). “Our acting careers are secondary to our brands at the moment. That’s not necessarily ideal but it was our way into it; and now, ten years later I can go, I want to do R&G – I’ll put my own money into it, I’ll get the people I want to work with. It’s something I want to keep doing, but you do have to try not to upset your brand. You have to differentiate; with R&G we had to say, this is not like Johan van der Walt, this is classic comedy, text comedy. There will be people who come not expecting Tom Stoppard and end up enjoying it. Fantastic! You want to expose people to other things, so you take that risk. But you must also remember that you have created a perception from your audience: people don’t want to see Malcolm Terry do Richard III or Rex Garner in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. They just don’t. Sometimes you can deviate from your brand – that’s why it’s nice to play at a festival, because audiences are more experimental, more forgiving – but at a commercial venue, you can’t go too far away from a brand that you set up.”

Nevertheless, Van Vuuren admits that “I’ve always struggled to identify my audience. My one-man shows are quite strange: they’re not straight comedy and they’re not straight drama, they’ve got weird elements of magic and fantasy. I don’t know where my audience are; they come, but I don’t know where they come from! I think Kalk Bay tends to be an older, more sophisticated crowd, which is great because they’re a theatre literate audience, but at the same time a lot of my work caters to a younger market or a younger sensitivity.”

I comment that geography can be more of a defining factor than one would expect – in Cape Town, for example, the Theatre on the Bay in Camps Bay and On Broadway in the City Bowl cater to a different audience to, say, the Baxter in the southern suburbs. Is this a good thing? Is it not a question of dividing an already limited audience? “I think the more theatres there are, the better it is for the theatre industry as a whole; it means there are more shows happening,” argues Van Vuuren. “It’s good for actors, but not for theatre owners,” quips Committie. “In Jo’burg, people who go to Theatre on the Square in Sandton generally don’t go to the Market or the Civic. At Montecasino, I play to people from Centurion, Pretoria, the East Rand – but not a typical northern suburbs crowd. But people will follow your work if they think it’s good enough.”

What about the differences between playing to audiences in Johannesburg and Cape Town? “I don’t think they are that radical. Other than peculiarities such as that in Cape Town, where you stay seems more important. Above the railway line or below the line? I can do twenty minutes on the differences between Plumstead, Diep River and Constantia East – and everyone can relate to that, they just know instinctively about the associations of a suburb name. Whereas in Jo’burg, I’ll say to someone in the audience, where are you from, and they’ll say Glanville East, and they are the only person out of 150 who will know where that is. Then they’ll say it’s near Glenview Extension Four, and you’ll say where is that, and they’ll say, Eastrandia. Which is near where? Well, Gateside ... And that becomes a joke – no-one knows where anything is. Otherwise, people will generally laugh at the same things.”

The other major difference is in the demographic composition of the audience; there are more black patrons at commercial theatres in Johannesburg. This is representative of a wider sociopolitical phenomenon – Cape Town is the less racially integrated of the two cities. I draw Van Vuuren’s attention to the fact that, in terms of white and black fans of The Most Amazing Show, their theatre crowds are very pale in comparison to their studio audiences. “Sure. For TMAS on stage, the audiences are still generally white. We don’t have a black theatre-going audience in this country proportional to the size of the black population. But there is a huge black following for the TV show.” This is also a function of economics; theatre tickets are expensive.

Some argue that, whereas TMAS on TV has black people laughing at Afrikaner trailer-trash stereotypes, TMAS on stage has white English-speakers laughing at Afrikaner trailer-trash stereotypes. Is this fair? Van Vuuren doesn’t think so. “People who don’t like the show – and we get lots of hate mail – and don’t enjoy the humour will say ‘You’re stereotyping’. People who enjoy the show won’t even think about it, it won’t cross their mind that this is a stereotype of an Afrikaans person. The comedy comes from a classic clowning duo: the tall guy and the short guy, the tension between them, the pants round the ankles, things like that. We have a very broad spectrum of cultural types that watch the show, from black to white, English and Afrikaans, even people from Durban!”

Committie argues that an older audience sometimes seeks out stereotyping, but that with younger audiences, “there is less baggage attached to their response. They either find it funny or it’s not funny. And Corne and Twakkie aren’t actually Afrikaans, are they? There are people who come to my show who speak English as badly as Johan van der Walt does, but they’re not Afrikaans. They just speak badly! I think that’s what Rob and Louw are sending up. And beyond that, the characters are so wacky and off-kilter – no-one actually talks like that.” Van Vuuren points out that he and Venter made a specific choice “to give TMAS a liminal quality. People who travel around in caravans aren’t English or Afrikaans, they’re just people who travel around in caravans, gipsies. They weave through cultures and don’t belong to any culture, they are outside or in between.”

And what about Committie’s Van der Walt, many of whose gags depend on linguistic inversions and mistakes with grammar? “He’s not a stereotype of Afrikaners, he’s a stereotype of a certain character, a certain personality type, a certain officiousness. I always say he’s Basil Fawlty from De Aar. That obnoxious person who always thinks he’s right. He just happens to be Afrikaans. Of course, he never talks fully in Afrikaans, he’s too stubborn to talk in his own language. People who don’t like the character will say ‘Oh, that’s a stereotype’, or ‘It’s slapstick’ – which is interesting because it’s very verbal, it’s not slapstick at all – or they’ll tell me it’s like Leon Schuster’s stuff, just because of the visual overlap of the teeth. I agree with Rob, people who enjoy it don’t think about it consciously. And nobody knows what slapstick means nowadays! It’s not a bad word. Are you telling me Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were crap because they did slapstick?”

Our discussion turns to different forms and genres of comedy, especially in light of the increasing overlap between stand-up comedy and comic acting. “Recently,” notes Committie, “there have been eight or nine one-man comedy shows in Cape Town alone. It’s nice to say that I was one of the few who was originally doing it – not stand-up per se, not physical theatre and not story-based, but rather blurring the lines: a comic persona and a comic actor, a story, a theme, stand-up with sets, playing off the audience but coming back to a script. At the moment I think there are too many in one place at one time. What it does mean, though, is that you start comparing quality. Mark Lottering was acting for years before doing standup, so he has got a theatrical background. His shows are always interesting, there’s always a theatricality to it. But others are coming out of a pure stand-up base. People think it’s a case of ‘Well, let’s just do it’ – but there has to be something behind it, a concept. The form itself is not enough, especially with everyone jumping on the one-man bandwagon because it’s the best way to make money. The art of entertainment requires certain techniques, even for stand-up comics. When I was preparing for Caveman, there were lines that I didn’t find funny. I’ve had to work really hard to make them funny.”

This challenges the assumption many people have that comedy is spontaneous and intuitive. Van Vuuren claims that “Stand-up scares me; I did it once and it was hideous. It’s too raw for me, I don’t see myself as that much of a funny person that I can just talk kak to people and make them laugh. For me, it’s about characters. What’s great is that comedy is coming back to the story. It used to be that you could impress everyone by playing sixteen characters; now, lots of people can do that and it’s not enough on its own.”

Committie agrees, but adds that you can bring a stand-up sensibility to a scripted play. “I don’t play Caveman as an actor with a fourth wall, I take a clowning approach, where the audience is another character in the play. I address my audience (Sir, Madam) and meet their gaze. It forces you into the present. That’s one thing about stand-up: it’s very vulnerable. If you act out a stand-up set, people sense your fear. You’ve got to go in and say, ‘Hello! Let me make you laugh!’ Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose that battle. It’s funny how comedians always talk about their craft in combative terms – ‘I killed them tonight’, ‘I slayed that audience’.”

Once our interview has ended, I watch these battle-scarred soldiers depart: Van Vuuren limps back to rehearsal (he sustained a knee injury rehearsing for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), while Committie curses the “vegetative assholes” driving the trucks that slow down the late-afternoon traffic he is about to encounter.

There’s no doubt that they are winning the war.