The stage is set for confrontation and rage in Fugard’s People Are Living There. Diane de Beer talks to Anna-Mart van der Merwe and introduces the rest of the cast
It’s a wonderful synchronicity that director Andre Odendaal and actress Anna-Mart van der Merwe have just worked together on a August Strindberg production for the Woordfees (held earlier this year in Stellenbosch) playing opposite one another with Ilse van Hemert as director.
“It’s amazing,” says Van der Merwe because Odendaal could witness her process and the way she worked with her character. And it would have been especially useful because while the two have worked together before, Van Hemert is also the director with whom the actress has worked most closely in her past career.
“The timing was right for us to work together again,” she says of Van Hemert’s occasional return to stage from her full-time TV career. “We leave our friendship aside when we work,” she says, but she also knows that the director knows how to her put it all out there.
This is her first Fugard and she’s pleased to work with Odendaal who, in experience, is perhaps a younger director but also attuned to young audiences.
“He has focused on the rhythms of the piece and speeding up the process. In days gone by, long pauses would have been more fashionable, but modern audiences will need more contemporary rhythms.”
They also cut some of the deadwood to determine the flow for a modern audience.
“He’s a sometimes wordy man, but his words are beautiful,” concedes Van der Merwe who had a hectic time learning her words for this one. “Milly’s all over the place,” she says and she literally had to hold on to her head. But she’s having fun with Odendaal and the cast of amazing young actors. She’s also delighted about this flow of the theatre world with Cape Town actors working in Gauteng and, hopefully, the other way round.
“We should get beyond limiting productions to specific spaces,” she says, “and celebrate what we have as a country.”
Even though this isn’t her first time at The Market, she has only had one previous appearance, 20 years ago, in a Mark Fleishman adaptation of Moby Dick! And the luxury of having a four-week rehearsal period and then a four-week run in these tough times is a huge thrill.
Van der Merwe, who moved back to Cape Town a few years ago but spent most of her earlier career in Joburg, became the TV/film darling of her Afrikaans audiences, but she has also always returned to stage with her most recent performance (before the August Strindberg) in Marthinus Basson’s Macbeth Slapeloos which also played at Grahamstown’s National Arts festival last year.
She feels that with James Ngcobo at The Market there’s a return of theatre to the stage.
“I love festivals,” she says, but she longs for productions to tour between stages across the country. “He seems to be saying, ‘let’s bring theatre back to where it belongs’.”
She believes provincialism shouldn’t exist in what is quite a small world. We can’t battle one another, but should fight together to promote the arts and the artists. “We should have many more co-productions happening,” she says.
It’s a start with Odendaal directing her at The Market and Jerry Mofokeng directing Aletta Bezuidenhout for the Klein Karoo Arts Festival which happened recently with an Afrikaans version of Brecht’s Mother Courage. For her it’s all about celebrating our arts. “We must start to realise and appreciate what we have,” she continues.
People Are Living There is an interesting piece and while she concedes that part of the decision is that it is a setwork, it’s also about returning again and again to South African stories. “Fugard has a specific South African voice which we should hold on to,” she says. “It’s part of what we need.”
She praises him as a playwright who understood the uniqueness of the South African madness and explored it with a sense of love and compassion.
And as the four actors do a reading of the work to give the media a taste of Fugard, Milly emerges with her “relentless pursuit of happiness”, as the director points out.
It’s a glorious chance for Gauteng audiences to catch some of the brilliance of Van der Merwe. Usually she’s touring the festival stages, but this time, she’s been gifted to local audience in what is hopefully the start of something much more lasting.
No politics, just feelings
Athol Fugard’s People Are Living There, at The Market’s Barney Simon tomorrow until May 24, is set in 1968 in Braamfontein and is one of few of his earlier works not dealing with the politics of the day, but in human emotions.
“He is a master of defining human beings and emotions,” says director Andre Odendaal who was invited by the Market’s artistic director James Ngcobo to direct this work. “I grew up at that time,” says Odendaal. “It was a sexy time and as happens with any classic, we bring a contemporary energy to the work.”
His only wish was to work with Afrikaans actress Anna-Mart van der Merwe (cast as Milly) and decided that the rest of the cast should also be Afrikaans. And they hope for a return of bigger Afrikaans audiences to The Market.
This is the only of Fugard’s plays that come from real life in the sense of him living in that area and listening to the people around him to tell this story.
It’s also a setwork which means it plays into The Market’s audience development plans: “They want to appeal to young people and the interest from schools has been huge. We’re playing without an interval not to interfere with the intensity,” says Odendaal whose production team includes Mannie Mannim on lighting, Nadya Cohen on set design and Nthabiseng Makone on costumes. Carel Nel as Don with Dania Gelderblom and Francois Jacobs as Sissy and Shorty complete the cast.
Focusing on four downtrodden whites living in the centre of Johburg, Fugard gathered material for the play when he and his wife stayed in lodgings in Braam-fontein when he was employed by the Johannesburg Native Commissioners court house.
The four characters face tough times as people with no or little education, stuck in a small flat with very little to do and nowhere much to go. Each started out with their own longings and desires, but their dreams have faded along with hope.
Milly, the main character and landlady, is celebrating her 50th birthday. She has been cast aside by her lover and the hurt and loneliness cut deep. The other characters are lodgers in her home: Don, whose pretentions at being the academic type are let down by his lack of drive; Shorty is a sweet but simple-minded man with a passion for boxing. He married 18-year-old Sissy after falling in love with her on their first meeting. But Sissy is restless, marrying Shorty only because she saw him as an opportunity to rise above her own dismal circumstances.