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The Company You Keep: Subversive Thoughts on the Impact of the Playwright and the Performer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Temple Hauptfleisch
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Abstract

This article explores the much-debated question of the political impact or potential of theatre from a new angle. Accepting frankly the limitations of a medium which seldom reaches more than four per cent of the population, Temple Hauptfleisch looks instead at the contingent ways in which influence works – creating ‘images’ of authors, performers, venues, companies, and even of specific occasions which work upon audiences and non-audiences alike. The ideas explored in this article were first proposed in a paper read at a colloquium on ‘The Semiotics of Political Transition’, held at the Port Elizabeth Campus of Vista University in August, 1992: although most of the author's examples are thus from the theatre world of South Africa, the major thrust of his argument holds equally well for any contemporary westernized, media-dominated society. Temple Hauptfleisch is Associate Professor of Drama and Head of Theatre Research at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He is co-editor of the South African Theatre Journal and has published widely on the history and theory of South African theatre.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 11 , Issue 44 , November 1995 , pp. 322 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

Notes and References

1. Sachs, Albie, ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom: Culture and the ANC Constitutional Guidelines’, The Drama Review, XXXV, No. 1 (Spring 1991), p. 187CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Esslin, Martin, The Anatomy of Drama (London: Abacus, 1978)Google Scholar.

3. For examples see the reactions documented in Steinberg, Carol, ‘Albie Sachs: Our Shakespearean Fool’, The Drama Review, XXXV, No. 1 (Spring 1991)Google Scholar, and in De Kok, Ingrid and Press, Karin, Spring is Rebellious: Arguments about Cultural Freedom (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990)Google Scholar.

4. The recent writings of Ross Kidd and Kees Epskamp provide accessible overviews of this trend in thinking.

5. In a series of studies which I conducted for the South African Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) between 1979 and 1982, we looked at theatre attendance and expectations of audiences in South Africa. See Hauptfleisch, Temple, ed., Belangstelling in die Kunste by die Suid Afrikaanse Publiek: ‘n Voorondersoek (Interest in the Arts among the South African Public: a Preliminary Study, Pretoria: HSRC, unpublished memorandum, 1983)Google Scholar: unfortunately this is only available in Afrikaans. The findings of these programmes by and large correspond closely with the various findings documented by Kamerman, Jack B. and Martorella, Rosanne in their exhaustive survey of studies done in the USA (Performers and Performances: the Social Organization of Artistic Work (South Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1983)Google Scholar.

6. In one of our HSRC studies we ran some statistical comparisons between theatregoers and those who attended (classical) music concerts: the profiles were identical enough to make the differences negligible for statistical purposes. Art lovers differed slightly, but still not very significantly, in profile.

7. I vividly remember my first exposure to the Slave's Chorus from Nabucco, for example: it haunts me to this day and has profoundly influenced my thinking about music and life. It was not in a theatre, though, but on a cold highveld night, under a lamplight, outside some stranger's house, when I was returning home after a rather disturbing evening with a girl-friend.

8. See, for example, McMurtry's, Mervyn analysis of Uys's satirical work and the evolution of Evita, in South African Theatre Journal, II (09 1994)Google Scholar. The image is so widespread that when the Cape Performing Arts Board produced the Lloyd-Webber Evita in Cape Town in November 1994, the Board found itself inundated by irate calls from individuals who had mistakenly bought tickets to see what they thought of as Uys's show starring his creation – and found themselves trapped in the theatre watching a musical. CAPAB publicity men were not slow in capitalizing on this in their marketing.

9. Of course there is an inherent symbiosis here: the performer creates the character, while the character shapes the performer's public persona – and hence the reading of any performance he/she may give. Some performers actually have trouble shaking off the influence of such a persona, the effects being read into the performance of his/her next character, whether appropriate or not. (Typecasting of course involves a cynical utilization of this by film-makers and theatre directors for their own purposes.) A South African example of this is the struggle the fine Afrikaans actor Marius Weyers has been waging for more than two decades to shake off the effects of his compelling performance as the tortured Jakes in the 1971 box office and critical success Siener in die Suburbs by P. G. du Plessis. No matter what he does today – in English or Afrikaans, and there are many who rate him the best actor in the country in either language – there is always someone who rakes up a comparison with the earlier performance.

10. A recent South African example has been the utilization of American actors Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington to help propagate voter education among black urbanites in the run-up to the historic elections of 27 April. The performers, in South Africa to work on their film Bopha!, were taken to various centres by the body responsible for voter education to draw people to the information sessions. It was not the actors as people but the public personae of them as ‘movie actors’ which was being utilized, of course, and in this case movie actors with a particular political profile.

11. This is of course no twentieth-century invention: the impact of an Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Yeats, or whoever is well documented, as are the deeds of mass murderers and serial killers, fanatics, ‘deviants’, and politicians. Compare, too, the matinee-idol status of some nineteenth-century actors and actresses. Our media have simply made it easier for celebrity to be disseminated.

12. A recent example from film: the Clint Eastwood persona of the post-Unforgiven period cannot be a gun-crazed psychotic any more, or will not be perceived that way at least. Even retrospectively the man with No Name and Dirty Harry are redeemed, their fight-fire-with-a-larger-fire philosophy somehow justified. Eastwood (and thus the character he portrays) has a new, enhanced image. Recent films have already begun to point the way in which this will be used.

13. The significance of such distinctions appears to have been tacitly acknowledged – and manipulated – by the powerful censorship structures of the ‘eighties. On a number of occasions plays with overtly subversive messages would be allowed to be performed, but only in ‘selected’ or ‘approved’ venues – that is, only in venues patronized by the small elite of regular theatregoers, and more particularly by those in a sense already ‘converted’ to the cause espoused by the play: i.e., the audiences of the ‘political’ theatres such as the Market. However, the same play would be kept from the general public by restricting its performances to the ‘approved’ theatres only (theatres not only economically but geographically beyond the reach of the average black citizen). In this way the oppressed and deprived masses were kept from exposure to ostensibly inflammatory material. The performance history of Barney Simon, Mbongeni Ngema, and Percy Mtwa's Woza Albert provides a good example of such manipulation, for it was allowed performances in all the ‘fringe’ theatres in the country and toured extensively abroad, but hardly ever managed a formal production in a black township in South Africa. All this appears in a way to refute my central argument, but the point remains: the palpable fear of the live performer and the accompanying gatekeeping system were set in place by the presumed power of the theatre as a medium for propaganda, an assumption based on claims made by theatre practitioners themselves – the very claims I am attempting to dispute here.

14. The play was based on Joubert's controversial novel about the trials of a black woman in South Africa. The book, which went on to win the Hertzog Prize, the most prestigious literary award for Afrikaans authors, as well as the CNA Award, excited much debate and – because of its otherwise non-offensive format (a simple story of a woman confronting the cruelties of an unjust society, in contrast to the much more provocative and sexually explicit writings of Etienne Leroux and André Brink) – played an important role in shifting public perceptions about the role of the (Afrikaans) writer/artist in the struggle. In some ways it was even more important as a literary, cultural, and political event than as a work of art.

15. An issue of some importance here is naturally also the matter of terrorization by association and the often debilitating self-censorship that may accompany this. Prescription and proscription are inescapable elements of human society, be the source of authority the church, the state, the communal sense of ethical values, or parental rule. Certainly, South Africans from all sides of the political and ethical spectrum have for a long time now found themselves assessing and reconsidering everything (from language to economics) in terms of a possible future society in which their current associations and affiliations may be considered wrong and held against them. By the beginning of the ‘nineties people were openly asking themselves: are the real and imaginary boundaries and structures represented by such opposing structures as the ANC's cultural desk and the government's censorship board not merely two sides of the same coin?