KEEP OFF THE GRASS. Directed by Gabriella Pinto, with Kelly-Eve Koopman. At the Alexander Upstairs Theatre, 76 Strand Street, until February 7. STEYN DU TOIT reviews.
IT doesn’t take long for the bottle of rosé to come out in Gabriella Pinto and Kelly-Eve Koopman’s Keep off the Grass. Plucked expertly from inside a tasteful, expensive-looking flower pot, this year’s Regional Ubuntu Garden of the Year Award adjudicators must have missed it when they came to inspect her carefully curated garden earlier this morning.
Be careful of passing judgement too quickly on the play’s Desperate Housewives suburban-type protagonist, however, as you’ll soon learn that she has more than enough to feel outraged over. She is, after all, a real amateur horticulturist. Not some hack like her neighbour, Mrs. Van der Byl, who “just sommer plaks cacti with bonsai and hopes for the best.”
Playing the unnamed, yet sublimely memorable homemaker is Koopman ( Woza, Andries, Ubu and the Secrecy Bill). Armed with gumboots, a garden fork and a sunny floral dress, she rarely gets up from her chair, nor does she resort to grand gestures or high voice pitches.
Instead playing out like the lo-fi buzz her character is feeling from the wine, this is a highly civilised production floating on an ocean of suggestive undercurrents.
Remember that intro scene from the TV show Dexter? In it we see him, while getting ready for the day, executing a series of seemingly pedestrian actions such as flossing his teeth or squeezing a grapefruit. Yet there is something in the presentation of these actions that involuntarily turn our minds towards feeling as if they’re carried out with murderous intent.
Similarly, while on the surface Koopman’s housewife might be heard comparing Wendy houses to garden chalets, or bushes trimmed to look like Madiba with celebratory buffets at the Cattle Baron, one is never quite able to shake the feeling that something much more sinister is lurking behind her words.
As a result, one does not doubt that the sign by her gate reading, “Keep off the Grass” is no more there for aesthetic purposes than a, “Beware of the Dog” equivalent would be. Set your foot on this home executive’s meticulously trimmed property without permission, and I’m sure an unfortunate “accident” involving your sprinkler system will soon follow.
“We wanted to create a one-woman show with a villain as the lead,” former SCriBE Scriptwriting competition-winner Pinto ( Chickens) tells me after Monday’s preview performance. “We weren’t interested in doing another love story, or one that focused on violence against women. We wanted a protagonist with agency, but also one that was fun to play on stage.”
Both having grown up in similar close-knit Cape Town communities, her and Koopman’s script does a remarkable job in evoking related imagery in the viewer’s mind. While the dialogue never mentions a specific suburb, it doesn’t have to because it could be found anywhere where Table Talks or TygerBurgers are delivered regularly.
Who are these people, you wonder, who live in their cocooned utopias and whose worst fears are not finding a parking space close to Woolworths’ entrance? What kind of person accuses their refugee gardener of being “disloyal” for accepting other work on his day off, or the neighbour that hired him as being “underhanded” in an attempt to have a prettier garden than them?
In addition to turning their wit and words towards the topics of female competition and the recent scourge of newspaper reports involving unprovoked incidents of suburban violence, with this play Pinto and Koopman have also succeeded in creating a vivid backstory for their carefully constructed antiherione.
“She’s coloured, upper-middle class and in her 30s,” Pinto goes on to tell me. “In addition, she’s married to a white husband and trying to assimilate herself into the bourgeois suburb she now finds herself living in.
“Status and prestige is important to her. She desires to be admired by the community. She has an opinion about everything and everyone. She criticizes everything.”
Understated, terminally delightful and buckling under all the decorum, undertaking a trip to the shady side of suburbia before Keep off the Grass ends next weekend is as tasty as that glass of rosé you’ll be able to take into the theatre with you.
l Tickets: R80 – R90, 021 300 1652, www.alexanderbar.co.za