“If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was Brian,” said Paul McCartney in a 1997 BBC interview, in case you were wondering about the title of the drama at Pieter Toerien’s Monte-casino Studio Theatre titled Epstein.
Epstein: The Man Who Made The Beatles which opened on Sunday (see review) is a window into the private world of the music entrepreneur whose career as The Beatles’ manager made him a household name, yet whose controversial personal life remained in the closet.
Epstein died in 1967 of an accidental overdose at the age of 32.
And why should anyone care? We are dealing with a generation who don’t always know who The Beatles are. “I knew who they were – just,” says a youthful Sven Ruygrok who plays a character simply called “This Boy”.
“I rather liked that,” says Ruygrok who turned from his planned career as a gymnast after a serious injury and found his niche as an actor. Within three weeks at UCT as a drama student he was offered a film role and the university asked him to make a choice. It was study or work? He’s never looked back.
But, says the actor playing the illusive Epstein, Nicholas Pauling, he spent four years at UCT’s drama school and his initial acting genes were awakened when he played a voiceless duck, but one with a powerful presence. And with this one directed by Cape Town’s Fred Abrahamse, it’s come full circle for Pauling.
“He also directed my first play,” he says of the production of Much Ado About Nothing which served as his professional stage debut.
This current two-hander is an intriguing concept. And if they pull it off, agree both actors, it will be a fine experience for cast and audiences. It imagines this brilliant but troubled man’s drug-fuelled final days while reflecting on his life and furiously fast rise to stardom on the edges of celebrity as the manager of the world’s biggest pop group.
“I see it as Brian’s back story,” says Pauling and by that he means the facts that drove his life. Celebrity was the thing that flipped him, probably because even though he had shot into the sky like a meteor, he was a bit of the outsider, the one who did the backstage wrangling, not the idol of the adoring fans like the four Liverpudlian rockers.
Even though Epstein was a man described as someone “who shaped music and style across the world”, his name was always out there, especially if you come from that time and yet, apart from his horrific death, not that much is known about his private life.
But this encounter with “The Boy” explores all of that.
“I wanted it to be more than a caricature,” says Pauling about capturing this enigmatic man. There’s so much footage of that time that he could easily have gone for imitation, but that’s not what actors do. Pauling sees Epstein as a man in crisis who brings a man home to help him work through this angst. “He was isolated much of the time.”
Both actors agree that more than anything, we’re dealing in celebrity, something so easily acquired these days and how it destroys any sense of a real life. “People think it’s about fame and money,” says Pauling about a time when the Kardashian and Jenners rule the celeb headlines.
For both of these Capetonian actors (Ruygrok moved there from Joburg for studies and fell in love with the city), this is their Joburg debut. Usually, the Toerien plays start in Cape Town before moving to Gauteng, but Pauling confesses for him, a theatre is a theatre is a theatre and what city, isn’t going to change the game.
It’s an intimate, wordy piece about two people who need different things from one another. It’s about what they represent to one another and how this impacts on their lives. The Beatles might be the hook, and you might hear some of their famous songs, but this is about living a life and how others might view it.
“Think about seeing one of your heroes and discovering that the real story is slightly different to the one perceived,” says Pauling.
What we have today are warped stories of celebrity lives.
“People are basically lonely,” says Ruygrok about his generation who are so plugged into the lives of others, more so than any other generation because of the technical advances and abilities.
“I hate using the metaphor, it’s so cliched,” says Pauling. “But it is like a boxing match as they both try to get the details of the other’s life.”