BWW Reviews: THE BLUE IRIS Disappoints and MIES JULIE Thrills on Cape Town stages, July 2012

A decade ago, I attended a lecture that addressed the need for South African theatremakers to tell their own stories. The idea of mounting plays by international playwrights was dismissed completely and adapting classic plays in our own idiom was viewed with disdain. The juxtaposition of THE BLUE IRIS at the Fugard Theatre and MIES JULIE at the Baxter Theatre, two productions that premiered at the National Arts Festival and which have transferred to Cape Town for commercial runs, offers a new opportunity to explore that debate, which is by no means a new one in the context of South African theatre.

THE BLUE IRIS is a new play by Athol Fugard: a South African story told by a South African playwright. The narrative focuses on Robert (Graham Weir) and Rieta (Lee-Ann van Rooi), a master and servant, who are clearing up the debris left by a fire that destroyed Robert’s Karoo farmhouse. The spirit of Robert’s wife, Sally (Claire Berlein), haunts what remains of the homestead and what follows is a dismantling their lives, as the characters expose long-held secrets in the hope of excising the ghosts of the past.

The play is a reconfiguration of ideas that are prominent elsewhere in Fugard’s work: an overt existentialist sensibility (PEOPLE ARE LIVING THERE); the use of a plant as a central symbol (A LESSON FROM ALOES); and the household setup of a local man with an English wife and a female servant (SORROWINGS AND REJOICINGS).

THE BLUE IRIS starts off in a typically absurdist fashion, with a great deal of dialogue and very little action. Robert and Rieta are waiting for something to arrive that makes meaning of their lives, a contemporary Vladimir and Estragon in a South African landscape. The play subsequently shifts into a lyrically realist mode and it is in that shift that the play begins to flounder.

As the pair seeks out and encounters Sally’s ghost, Fugard forces the characters to make meaning. The symbolism of the titular flower, beautiful but poisonous, comes into play. Secrets are revealed and grand revelations are made. The problem is that the foundation upon which the latter half of the play is built is not deep enough. Because the entire play involves a retelling of the characters’ history without unpacking the consequences thereof, the conclusion is sentimental and unsatisfying.

Although the play is disappointing, the performances are arresting. Weir breathes into Robert a life that makes the text resonate far beyond its shortcomings. Van Rooi is an excellent foil for him and she develops Rieta beautifully over the course of the play. Berlein is rawly emotional in her single scene, although she appears too concrete for an otherworldly being.

THE BLUE IRIS might have been a better play had Fugard made clearer decisions about its style and intent. Had he followed through on the existentialist thrust of the piece, a fine political allegory about the state of reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa might have emerged. I suspect, however, that it is the personal rather than the political that interests Fugard here and, to this end, the play should have pushed its way through its lyrical realist trappings into a stark and startling work of magic realism.

MIES JULIE is a new play adapted by Yael Farber from August Strindberg’s MISS JULIE: a Swedish story made South African. The play deals with the aftermath of the ideological dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, commenting on the process of political and personal reconciliation, using the issue of land claims as a focal point. This is distilled into the story of Julie (Hilda Cronje), the daughter of an unseen landowner, and that of two servants who have ancestral claims to the land, Christine (Thoko Ntshinga) and John (Bongile Mantsai).

The adaptation of Strindberg’s original text is not a cursory one. Farber has taken the source material and reworked it extensively to suit a South African milieu. For the most part, it works:  there are a few moments when language sits uncomfortably on the tongues of the characters. Sometimes, this is a matter of vocabulary (as when Christine says that she will ‘press’ John’s suit for church rather than ‘iron’ it), but it is more disruptive when Farber puts thesis statements about the ‘restitution of body and soil’ into the mouths of the characters. It is not unimaginable that the characters might express something of the kind, but the lines sounds like a playwright’s ideas rather than a character’s speech.

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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