From Protest Theatre to the Theatre of Conformity

FROM PROTEST THEATRE TO THE THEATRE OF CONFORMITY? I’ve always been a little bemused by theatre-makers who claim that after 1994, they no longer knew what to make theatre about. If the number of recent revivals of anti-apartheid-era theatre is anything to go by, some of them still don’t know. I would have thought that for writers, South Africa is now a lot more interesting than the apartheid era when the big narrative was pretty clear. Then, it was black against white, us against them, goodies against baddies, and the only really interesting thing was how would the story end. Would it be bloody? Would the baddies be driven into the sea? Well, no. We would simply ask some of the really bad guys to say sorry, and then give them a golden handshake to go farming in the Karoo. While these latter questions have largely been answered, the story hasn’t really ended. Rather, we have simply entered a new chapter. A society in transition has much to offer its theatremakers. There is greater complexity, more irony, many contradictions allowing for characters to be less one-dimensionally good or bad. Former heroes can display their feet of clay; one-time villains, their hearts of gold. Ours is a society in which the answers are not as clearcut as before; where there is no single right way; where values and ideas are being keenly contested. And all of these have direct implications for the people who inhabit our society, for the story of each individual plays itself out against the backdrop of the bigger, unfolding narrative. It is here that I generally seek to locate my work: in the exploration of how the bigger socio-political narrative impacts on the individual narrative, how that individual story in turn impacts on the macro-story, in the dialectic between the personal and the political, which, if it was relevant before, is surely still relevant today? And yet, there are many who would say that there is no longer a need for political theatre. In the aftermath of the mass assault of antiapartheid theatre, there is almost a desperate plea for theatre to be released from the burden of politics. As if the election of a democratic government and the adoption of a constitution premised on fundamental human rights, are the magic wands by which we 1 have attained the promised land, where theatre no longer needs to concern itself with macro-political dramas in which ordinary people have bit parts. So now we can get on with our happy clappy rainbow nation musicals, our proudly South African, flag-waving, carefully demographically quota’d theatre, and our praise-poems about people having electricity, running water, houses, health care and the like. After all, in a letter to last week’s Sunday Independent, the Minister of Finance pointed out to John Pilger, that gainsayer of our miracle nation, our not inconsiderable achievements: “more than 700 new health clinics, 215 mobile clinics; the child-support grant programme has added 7 million new beneficiaries; water supplied to 10 million people, sanitation facilities to more than 6 million, electricity to 16 million and more than 3 million hectares of land redistributed to benefit about 700 000 households”. So, is there a need for protest theatre within this land of milk and honey? To begin to answer this, please allow me the indulgence of quoting from a review of Green Man Flashing done by This Day’s critic, Max Rayneard after seeing the play at its premiere at the National Arts Festival in 2004. For those of you who did not see Green Man Flashing, it was a play about a senior cabinet minister, who, six months before the 1999 elections, is accused by his personal assistant of having raped her. If the allegations become public, they will seriously hamper the ruling party, so they send a delegation to persuade her not to drop the charges. The play juxtaposes the political interests of the ruling party against the national pandemic of violence against women, the human rights of an individual against the collective social good. Against the backdrop of these macro-political themes, individuals – the alleged victim and her former husband who is part of the party delegation – have to make decisions about what they will do. Rayneard writes: Protest theatre has struggled to come to terms with itself after 1994. The didactic agitprop forms of the 80s and 90s have clung on for dear life despite the fact that the traditional object 2 of their scorn, oppressive Christian Nationalism, is virtually extinct. Typically then, protest theatre has directed itself at the new scourges: poverty, crime and HIV/AIDS. And despite the fact that none of these enemies have ears in and of themselves, too many actors in too many productions have pointed accusing fingers and given them a jolly good telling off. With all due respect, it’s generally understood that crime is bad, poverty is rotten and that HIV makes you dead. It’s getting rather tired, having our heads stuffed with truisms. The good news is that even though it’s taken 10 years, protest theatre is evolving again. In Green Man Flashing, Van Graan’s writing and Stopford’s direction conspire to infuse the stage with the kind of subtlety a country and era as complex as ours should demand of its theatre. It’s about time. A friend took great offence on my behalf at the labeling of Green Man Flashing as “protest theatre”. In the review and my friend’s response, lie many of the pertinent questions about this thing called “protest theatre”. “Protest theatre” is not unique to South Africa. Research which I conducted for an Honours dissertation at this very institution some twenty years ago, as well as a recent search on the web both reveal that “protest theatre” is a genre of theatre that manifests itself in many situations of political conflict and social oppression, and unashamedly calls itself by this name. This is true of contemporary South Asian Canadians in Toronto who combine the political and folk theatre of India to protest against racism and violence towards women in Canada; in the anti-war Vietnamese protest theatre; in the work of Luiz Valdez and El Teatro Campesino protesting the treatment of workers on the orchards of California in the sixties; in the message theatre of the current anti-war movement in the USA, and in the protest theatre of Zimbabwe where, as in our own apartheid era, theatre has begun to fill the gaps left by the banning or censorship of newspapers, then leading to plays being banned and theatre makers being kept under surveillance. 3 For many in South Africa, certainly pre-1994, wearing the protest theatre label was a badge of honour. After all, that’s what the iniquitous system of apartheid demanded, surely? Protest! Until they began to realise that the theatre establishment – overwhelmingly white and privileged under apartheid - had, at best, an ambiguous attitude towards “protest theatre”. Why this ambiguity? 1. Writing about the current resurrection of You Strike the Women, You Strike the Rock at the State Theatre, Dianne de Beer of the Pretoria News says it is “watershed protest theatre painful to watch yet uplifting for the soul”. For the mainly white, liberal audiences of the 70s and 80s, going to the Space, the Market and the Baxter was like going to church. Watching protest theatre was like going to confession for their collective sin as beneficiaries of apartheid, and while it was painful to watch, the actors were essentially performing rituals that were uplifting for the soul of the audience. They then left the theatre cleansed for having been spat at, and if they sat close enough, being spat on. Viva! Viva! Go and sin no more. Now we often hear that audiences – still overwhelmingly white and middle class – don’t want to be reminded of those times. It’s been suggested to me that perhaps some of what the black character Vusi says about his experiences at the hands of the brutal apartheid regime in my own play, Some Mothers’ Sons, be toned down for white audiences, no matter that these experiences are central to the choices that he makes. We’ve done the guilt thing. So let’s move on, dammit! Sitting in a recent performance of Sizwe Banzi is Dead, I smiled at the many “oohs”, and “aahs” and “shames” emanating from the sympathetic audience as the characters confronted some of the absurdities of apartheid. What once was protest theatre, has now become theatre of nostalgia: good as history lessons, gentle reminders of what things used to be like, but lacking the edge that the immediacy of the apartheid environment would have provoked. 4 2. This brings me to the second point of ambiguity. While it is hardly ever articulated boldly, there is a sense that “protest theatre” was regarded as inferior theatre, theatre that wouldn’t stand the tests of good theatre such as universality and timelessness. At best, “protest theatre” – or that which was so classified by the pencil test of white critics, academics, practitioners and commentators at the time – was regarded at best as understandable and even necessary at the time, but infinitely limited. While it might have had political validity, “protest theatre” was a bit of an embarrassment, like an unsophisticated relative from the country, an assault on the establishment’s sense of theatre aesthetics and practice. It is true that generally, anti-apartheid theatre, particularly that which was created without the influence of trained, generally white practitioners like Barney Simon, lacked in theatrical expertise. But this should hardly have been surprising given that apartheid education denied black people access to the arts at school level, that career opportunities for black performers were extremely limited in the performing arts council era and that tertiary training institutions with drama departments were generally inaccessible. As a person of colour, I had to apply for a permit to attend UCT, a white university. To get such a permit from the Department of Coloured Affairs, I had to do a subject not offered by the University for Wasted Coloureds – that’s UWC. For me, that subject was drama, and I had to do it as a major. So, thanks to apartheid, I’m still a struggling artist whereas I could’ve been an accountant heading up a BEE company! Some of the characteristics of “poor cousin” protest theatre were a. the plays were didactic, with little room for interpretation. The message was the thing; theatre was simply the vehicle. b. the form was generally a storytelling one, with actors addressing the audiences directly, often in declamatory style c. actors usually played a variety of roles in the storytelling process 5 d. there were no large sets, or multiple props or fantastic costumes because of a lack of resources, but also to the make the play portable e. actors were generally untrained; the combination of raw talent and the proximity of the situations being portrayed to their own lives, accounted for the credibility of the pieces f. generally, the characters were closer to caricatures representing types, rather than multi-layered characters g. many pieces of protest theatre combined the disciplines of music, dance and theatre h. the piece would be performed in community halls where they would be well-received by the audiences who related directly to their themes, and when the same piece would sometimes be performed in formal theatres where the life experience of the audiences would be other i. the plays were often workshopped in accordance with the principles of democracy rather than have one writer as the all-seeing eye or brain While the local theatre establishment would be dismissive towards “protest theatre”, for being too political and not sufficiently theatrical, these characteristics of “protest theatre” would not be too dissimilar to the protest theatre of Vietnam, the barrios of South America, the Spanish farmworkers in California and even the educated anti-war activists in the USA. The themes of “protest theatre” might not have had resonance with privileged audiences in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, but they would have struck a chord with people struggling against injustice and oppression in other parts of Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia and South America. At the same time, the plays of Neil Simon, Robert Bolt and Sam Sheppard might be universal for the middle class audiences of London, Cape Town and New York, but would have little resonance with the life experiences of the underclasses of India, the Democratic Republic of Congo or Brazil. The point is that notions of universality and timelessness are not absolutes; they are class bound, intimately linked to life experience, wealth, education, exposure to the arts, or lack 6 thereof. If this is true, then the dismissive or ambiguous attitudes to protest theatre by the theatre establishment in our country, are largely a reflection of the prejudices of class and privilege. If the arts, and theatre in particular, are reflections of the conditions in which they are created, then given the nature and impact of apartheid, the rise of protest theatre in our country was inevitable. What was equally inevitable, given apartheid education, was that generally, protest theatre would lack the theatrical sophistication of the privileged theatre establishment. But, was all theatre that had anti-apartheid themes “protest theatre”? Or was it only the theatre made primarily by black people? Is all theatre with political themes that are critical of the status quo necessarily “protest theatre”? A quote on the net states that Mary Benson refused to pigeonhole (Barney) Simon’s or Fugard’s plays simply as protest theatre. What made their theatre “not protest theatre”? What was the implied criticism of “protest theatre”? Benson quotes Barney Simon as follows “…he said we should go into people’s lives, their souls, their ways of life, and if it brings aspects of the struggle then that’s okay. But it’s good if it can go beyond just protesting against the horrors and inspire people to function constructively.” Is it not protest theatre if the characters are more layered, even if the themes are primarily antiapartheid in nature? If the play goes beyond protesting the horrors and “inspires people to function constructively”, is it no longer “protest theatre”? Is it more acceptable when the same things are explored and said by three-dimensional characters, than by actors speaking these things directly to an audience? When it is more subtle, less in-your-face, does that make theatre, “theatre” as opposed to “protest theatre”? 3. The third important factor in the development of “protest theatre” was the international community. Not only did international funders provide the resources for the generation of anti-apartheid theatre, but these plays were welcomed in the capitals of Western Europe and North America at a time when the international sanctions and disinvestments campaigns were at their height. 7 Notwithstanding the ambiguity of local audiences – “it’s painful but good for the soul” and the theatre establishment – it’s not universal, timeless or good theatre - ironically, international audiences greeted anti-apartheid theatre enthusiastically. Was it their liberal abhorrence of apartheid that made them romanticize the theatre of the time? Perhaps. Did they patronize those forms of South African theatre because of their commitment to the moral cause of Mandela and black South Africans? Maybe. Or was it a genuine acceptance of this combination of form and content that was so different to what they were used to? Whatever, the international community provided significant impetus towards the creation of further “protest theatre” for international export, so that the Market Theatre and Fugard became – and remain - the country’s best-known performing arts brands internationally. Given the preceding discussion about the protest theatre of the apartheid era, the questions that arise are: who determines what is protest theatre? Is it the practitioners thereof? Is it critics? Academics? Is there a list of objective criteria by which to evaluate or label theatre? And, what is the point of such labels anyway? Does it serve theatre? Does it help audiences? Given the antipathy towards the notion of “protest theatre” - hence my friend’s response to This Day review of Green Man Flashing - is it useful to speak of protest theatre now? Or will it turn off audiences? Or make some critics reach for their vomit bags? If the conditions exist for protest theatre, should we call it something else, or do we infuse protest theatre with new meaning, that would rehabilitate it for traditional theatre audiences since now it would be directed towards a black government and its partners, as opposed to the apartheid regime and its beneficiaries? I ask these questions not because I have the answers to them, but because it would appear that the attitude to politically theatre provokes contradictory, sometimes hypocritical responses, reflecting superficial emotional, political or class prejudices, rather than rationality or intellectual rigour. Why are these questions important? It is not simply an academic exercise to define protest theatre, but rather to understand how we 8 need to respond to the emergence of the political theatre of our times. Do we pour new wine into old wineskins? Will labels of the past hold for our current times? Will it facilitate or inhibit the development of politically critical theatre in the current dispensation? Indeed, is it precisely because of the ambiguous, dismissive attitudes towards “protest theatre” that our current theatre is generally so anemic, so supportive of, so aligned to the political status quo, so unquestioning? Or is it that we simply have nothing to protest about? Allow me briefly to present a few statistics other than the ones quoted earlier from the Minister of Finance: We have two definitions of unemployment in our country: a. limited definition: those of economically active capacity who still look for work and b. an expanded definition: those who have been so discouraged, that they no longer look for work. In terms of the limited definition, we have an unemployment rate of 26%, while the broader definition brings us closer the reality of 41% of our economically active population being unemployed. We had 3 million unemployed people in 1994; today – according to the limited definition, we have 4,5 million, but 8,5 million according to the broad definition. For all the concerns about affirmative action, 87,5% of the unemployed are African men and women, followed by 7,5% coloured, 2,3% Indian and 2,7% white. In the Western Cape, unemployment is 24%, or roughly 500 000 people, of whom, 80% are young people between 20-26. This is the worst province for African males to find work with only 2 out of every 100 finding employment. Of the 11,6 million people who have jobs, more than 60% earn R2500 or less per month. Of the total of 7,8 million African workers, 72% earn between R1-R2500 per month. After Brazil, South Africa has the highest rate of inequality. The measurement of poverty in our country indicates that 45% of our citizens – 18 million people – are deemed to be poor. In 2000, the 9 poorest 50% of the country’s households received a mere 1,6% of the total income, down from 1,9% five years earlier. Poor people are becoming even poorer. By contrast, 6% of our population captures 40% of earned income. According to the Sunday Times, we boast at least 20 billionaires and 130 people worth more than R100 million each. In the last year, we created 5000 new dollar millionaires, yet 50% of our country’s households get by on R20 per day or R600 per month. Notwithstanding these levels of poverty, government officials who are paid to be at the coalface of alleviating poverty, are primarily responsible or stealing from the poor. According to a newspaper report earlier this year, 37 000 public servants are under investigation for fraud, with fraud and corruption costing government’s social grants system R1,5 billion per year. To continue the crime theme, in the last Crime Statistics released by government, we are told that we have 19 800 murders per year. This is the lowest we’ve had since 1994, yet it still amounts to 53 people each day. In countries not at war, only a Columbian stands a better chance of being murdered than a South African. There are about 4,5 million registered firearms in South Africa and estimates are of a further 500 000-1 million unregistered firearms. 52 700 women were raped in the last reported year, or 144 per day. But that’s only the reported rapes. 41% of rape victims are children, with 15% of all reported rape victims being children under 11, and 26% of children aged 12-17. 58 children are victims of rape every single day. If that’s not enough yet, here are some AIDS statistics. In 2004, it was estimated that 311 000 people died of AIDS, comprising 44% of all deaths in South Africa in that year. That’s more than 850 people per day. Among 15-49 year-olds, it is estimated that 70% of all deaths are attributed to AIDS. One report indicated that the average person goes to funerals twice per month in South Africa, meaning that one person knows at least 24 people who die of AIDS each year. Now, given these statistics – which, in terms of death is of genocidal proportions – and given that behind every single one of those 10 statistics, there is at least one human story, the question that screams to be asked is “WHY IS THERE NOT MORE THEATRE OF PROTEST?”, but not just theatre of protest, theatre that expresses OUTRAGE at the daily assaults on the fundamental human rights and freedoms of the majority of our fellow citizens. Why? Why? Because we still feel a bit squeezy about “protest theatre?”? Because that’s not what our current, middle class, privileged, still primarily white audiences want? Because we’re afraid that we might not access public funds from the new gatekeepers of freedom of creative expression at the NAC and the Lottery? Because we are concerned that current theatre managements and festivals that are dependent on public funding might decline our work? Because we’re too guilty about being past beneficiaries of apartheid so feel we don’t have a right to be critical now? Because we don’t want to be labeled racists or fellow travelers of the DA or sellouts or traitors of the revolution? Because we worry that the politically correct international community to whom we might want to export our works might not like plays that are critical of the darling, miracle nation? Because we have friends, family and comrades in government? After each of the performances of Green Man Flashing, I had Comments Books for audiences to record their responses to the play, much like people do at museums or art galleries. One of the recurring comments was that it was a “courageous” play, a “brave” play. This comment also came from Maishe Maponya, himself no shrinking violet as a playwright in the 70s and 80s. I find these comments rather disturbing because it is less a comment on the play than on our society. As in Zimbabwe today, so it was in the apartheid era: then, one really to be brave to do theatre. One’s work could be banned. You could be arrested. You could be detained. For goodness’ sake, I was arrested for doing a piece of anti-migrant labour street theatre in Claremont Main Road because we constituted an illegal gathering. We knew that we could be arrested, but we did it anyway. The People’s Festival that we were planning to have at the end of 1985 during the state of emergency was banned two days before it was to happen as it was deemed a threat to national security. We used to have meetings in the kombi of 11 one of the committee members but that didn’t stop some of the committee from being detained without trial for a while. Now, we have a Constitution that guarantees us the right to freedom of creative expression, and more than ten years after the dawning of democracy, we consider it brave for a playwright to be doing a play like Green Man Flashing. What does it say about our society? About our government’s sensitivity to criticism? About the self-censorship that has become endemic to our society? What does it say about our democracy? What does it say about our theatre industry? About us as writers, theatre-makers? Theatre - like all art, education, the media and other institutions of socialization – inhabits the realm of hegemonic conflict, the battle to provide leadership with respect to ideas, values, worldviews, ideological assumptions to inform the development of our society and of our own individual lives. Whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, the act of making theatre is essentially a political act. What we choose to make theatre about, and what we decide to leave out, who we decide to do theatre for, which audiences and at which theatres or buildings we do theatre, are in essence, politically strategic choices. However we may wish theatre to be apolitical, what we do theatre about, where we do it, and for whom, serve to reinforce or challenge dominant values, beliefs, ideas. One of the few theatre-makers who has remained true is Pieter-Dirk Uys. He has aimed his barbs at the current wielders of power as much as he did to the previous government. And he is active as a citizen, not just a theatre-maker, writing letters to the newspapers – as he did yesterday – to protest against the impending censorship of the media. Despite the political themes, his work is as popular today as it was then. Is he a protest theatre practitioner? Is Green Man Flashing an evolved piece of protest theatre? I don’t know. And, quite frankly, I don’t care. I do not set out to write a piece of protest theatre; I set out to write a piece of theatre that has resonance for contemporary South African audiences, to make them think and perhaps to make them feel. 12 When the audience discussed Green Man Flashing after the reading during the PANSA/UCT Drama School Festival of New Writing, I remember someone saying that it was a fine play, but that it wouldn’t get an audience. People were just not interested in political theatre anymore. The reality though, was that when it premiered on the Fringe of the National Arts Festival the following year, we had to turn people away at the door. When it played at the Baxter last year, it played to 77% paying audience capacity. I wonder if we as the theatre community are not engaged in selffulfilling prophecies. It is not a case that we have nothing to write about or that audiences don’t want political theatre; perhaps it is we – unlike the likes of Pieter Dirk Uys – who simply don’t have the balls to take on contemporary issues, and so we become part of the problem for the majority of our country’s inhabitants, conformed to the status quo, buying into the pursuit of personal wealth notwithstanding the conditions of our fellow citizens, immune to suffering and poverty due to our own comfort zones. In the process, we compromise the cathartic role that theatre could play, and must play in a society in transition and which is as traumatized as ours. And we compromise democracy when we retreat and do not engage through our work and through our actions as citizens in giving meaning to, and in defending our constitutional freedoms, allowing others to make democracy in their self-serving image. For the sake of our democracy, for the sake of the majority of our country’s inhabitants, for the sake of the society in which we live, for the sake of the society which our children will inherit, it is imperative that, whatever we call it, we see the rise of theatre that boldly, unequivocally, unashamedly speaks truth to the powers that be. I’d like to end with a poem which is my personal mantra as an artist/playwright and which is one of the poems included in Mixed Metaphors. I am not a patriot for pointing out naked emperors for not joining the chorus of praise singers for allegiance to country, not party 13 I am a traitor for practising constitutional freedoms for choosing the margins not mainstream for saying what others but think I am anti-transformation for still sprouting non-racist mantra for being happy with grey amidst black and white for not being a brother to opportunism I am a sell-out for donating my poetry to resistance for refusing to live in denial for declining thirty pieces of silver I am an apartheid spy for not turning a blind eye to corruption for loyalty to principle not expedience for daring to uphold the law I am an ultra-leftist for supporting human rights in Zimbabwe for believing HIV causes AIDS for not being a millionaire socialist I am a racist for breaking the silence with a whisper for preferring thought to propaganda for standing up amidst the prostrate for repeated conspiracy with the questions what, how, why I am a danger to society for not martyring my mind for not terminating my tongue for not sacrificing my soul I have been here before but then as a communist an atheist 14 a Marxist anarchist and I am here again as some other “ist” this time as artist labels they come and labels they go hard on the footsteps of those who defend new privilege with old morality who appropriate history for contemporary pillaging who now crucify the people on their electoral crosses I have been here before and I shall be here again for as long as the poor – like Truth – are with us Mike van Graan August, 2006 References 1. Athol Fugard and Barney Simon: Bare Stage, a Few Props, Great Theatre, Mary Benson 2. Child rape epidemic in South Africa, Anthony C LoBaido, Worldnetdaily, 26 December 2001, www.worldnetdaily.com 3. Crime hurts South Africa’s plan to host World Cup, Fred Bridgland, The Scotsman, 9 August 2006 4. Crime Statistics for South Africa (1994/5 to 2003/4), http://www.capegateway.gov.za 5. HIV and AIDS statistics for South Africa, AVERT, http://www.avert.org/safricastats.htm 6. Highlights of the Current Labor Market Conditions in South Africa, National Labour and Economic Development Institute (NALEDI), 8 January 2004 7. 37000 civil servants in social grant scam, Jeremy Michaels, www.iol.co.za or The Cape Times, 6 April 2005 8. Right to Work: necessary road to freedom, Presentation by the Alternative Information and Development Centre (AIDC) 9. SA’s super-rich are getting even richer, Marcia Klein, http://www.sundaytimes.co.za 10. We’re killing each other at a baffling rate, Terry Leonard, www.iol.co.za, 11 August 2006 11. Young, black and unemployed, Aarthi Sivaraman, Erica Perez and Tony Weaver, Cape Times, 10 June 2004 15