BWW Interviews: Chilling on The Pink Couch with MAFEKING ROAD's Andrew Laubscher and Mathew Lewis

MAFEKING ROAD, the Pink Couch's widely acclaimed adaptation of the short stories of Herman Charles Bosman, opened at the Kalk Bay Theatre in Cape Town last week. The show, performed by Andrew Laubscher and Mathew Lewis and directed by Tara Notcutt, is a much more physical look at the works of Bosman, whose work has hitherto been represented in performance through the medium of storytelling and this new take on some of South Africa’s most prized home-grown literature earned the trio a Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award for Physical Theatre at the National Arts Festival in 2011 .

I had the great pleasure of sitting down with Laubscher and Lewis to chat about the show, The Pink Couch and their respective careers in the theatre.

David Fick: How did you get started in theatre?

Mathew Lewis: I studied at the University of Cape Town. When I graduated, we founded The Pink Couch and since then have worked as a stage manager, lighting designer and actor in theatre.

Andrew Laubscher: After school, I wasn’t doing very much – messing around in Stellenbosch and getting fired from waitering jobs – and my dad said I should go study drama at UCT. I went and auditioned and got in. Since I graduated, I've mainly been working in different kinds of theatre – children's theatre, Shakespeare at Maynardville and productions for The Pink Couch and The Mechanicals.

DF: Tell me about The Pink Couch.

ML: The Pink Couch was founded in 2005 by Tara Notcutt, Albert Pretorius, Gideon Lombard and me. Our debut production was …MISKIEN. We founded The Pink Couch with the view to make theatre accessible to the younger generation, who would normally go and watch the latest movie, and make stories that they would find enjoyable. We’ve grown to include Andrew, James MacGregor and Cintaine Schutte and gone from strength to strength. We’ve toured to Perth and Amsterdam and we hope to continue doing fun and exciting things.

AL: Where did the name come from?

ML: Tara was driving around Woodstock one day and saw a pink couch on the side of the road.

DF: How did this project come about?

AL: It was in 2010 and Tara wanted to take something to the Voorkamerfest in Darling and came up with the idea of doing the Herman Charles Bosman stories in a comic book style. Tara phoned us up and we had 2 weeks to do 2 stories, "In the Withaak's Shade" and "Willem Prinsloo's Peach Brandy". We read the stories and started to do our own thing with them. Tara knew what she wanted in terms of style and shaped it.

DF: In the current show, MAFEKING ROAD uses 4 stories and has a meta-theatrical framework that plays into the idea that you’re just actors in the space, using your whole bodies as well as your voices to tell the tales. The show is so much fun and you play anything and everything: Oom Schalk Lourens and other folk in the Groot Marico, a horse named Bertie, a leopard with many spots, even a pretty young girl fresh from finishing school. What are your favourite parts of the show to perform?

ML: Probably "A Bekkersdal Marathon", especially the last part. It's quite a fun one and because it's the newest, it feels fresher.

AL: The story I like most is "Willem Prinsloo's Peach Brandy", but I also like the moments when we break away from the stories. It's a fun show to perform and there's no moment you dread doing night after night like you get in some plays.

ML: Yes, it’s all quite enjoyable.

DF: You've racked up quite a number of performances of the show.

ML: With the opening of this run, we've done 50 performances of the show.

AL: That's without the Voorkamerfees performances and school performances. With those, it's probably close to 70.

Born and bred in South Africa, David has loved theatre since the day he set foot on stage in his preschool nativity play. He graduated with a Master of Arts (Theatre and Performance) degree from the University of Cape Town in 2005, having previously graduated from the same university with a First Class Honours in Drama in 2002. An ardent essayist, David won the Keswick Prize for Lucidity for his paper "Homosexual Representation in the Broadway Musical: the development of homosexual identities and relationships from PATIENCE to RENT". Currently, he teaches Dramatic Arts at a high school in Cape Town and also freelances as a theatremaker and performer.

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