Vanessa Cooke passes on the baton to a new generation, writes Diane de Beer
Actor and director Vanessa Cooke (pictured) was quite daunted by the prospect of mentoring a young director when artistic director of The Market, James Ngcobo, asked her.
But as part of the original cast and one who helped create this extraordinary play, he wanted her to inform the director and his young cast from a historical point of view.
“It wasn’t about the staging of the play, it was about the times,” she says. And once into rehearsals, she started having fun because of the youthfulness of her wards and the way they experienced and see the times past. She was also thrilled about Mathibe’s desire to stage this particular play.
“He was so enthusiastic and it’s been so wonderful to experience how a new generation sees other things than the ones we do who lived through those times,” she says.
Cincinatti was created through the personal realities and experiences of the cast. It is refreshingly honest in the way it explores issues of race, governing law and relationships. Cooke remembers that at the time, workshopping a play was still a very new experience. But Simon wanted to tell the stories of ordinary people and how they were affected by the harsh reality and cruel policies of the land.
“We didn’t know how audiences would react,” she remembers as she describes a play dealing more with people and language than with what was happening around them.
Looking back, she can both laugh and cry about the content and what she tried to convey was the feel of that time and how ordinary people were going about their lives. Some, of course, were affected with every breath they took, while others were only affected on the surface, but their real lives were as normal as it could be in an abnormal society.
Walking into the buzz of the rehearsal space with an extraordinary cast including some of the hottest young talent around, it’s easy to understand Cooke’s excitement. She’s pleased with the young director who returned from a Toronto internship with such a clear idea of what he wanted to do with the play.
“It’s about this analogy of a club being shut down,” she says, thinking back. But she knows that for the present generation it’s also about looking forward and what Cincinatti says to them today.
“They so get the past,” she says about the cast, but also knows that for Simon it was about a need to conscientise audiences.
“He was very clever in the way he put his message across,” she says. The structure and way of telling was loosely based on La Ronde, probably one of the most adapted plays in the world. Paul Grootboom also a few years back used it as his base for Foreplay.
“It’s not that anything of great import happens in the play, it’s much more about the relationships.” But, of course, in South Africa at the time – three years after the Soweto riots – that would speak volumes. Everyone’s headspace would have determined who they were.
Looking at her own future on stage, she wants to get back to acting – with Leila Henriques in whose play she was cast last year as part of her Wits post-grad studies. But she’s also directing Blackbird starring Lionel Newton at the State Theatre later this year.
l Cincinatti runs from August 19 to September 13 at The Market’s Laager Theatre.