History repeats as journos find way to get story out

Published Apr 21, 2015

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A new play from playwright and journalist, Tony Jackman, tackles freedom of the press in two different eras of upheaval in South Africa, writes Theresa Smith

A FAMILY trip through Cradock 25 years ago ignited journalist Tony Jackman’s interest in writer Olive Schreiner. In fact, the second play he ever wrote is about the imagined interplay between Schreiner (there’s a museum in Cradock edicated to the writer) and Cecil John Rhodes.

“I have a line in that play, which has not been produced professionally yet, which has a sudden relevance. I have Schreiner referring to the statue of Rhodes in the Company’s Garden in which she says: ‘Why do they not tear it down?’ It’s a pity that play is not on right now,” chuckled Jackman.

While this play, The Knocking, is the second Jackman wrote, it is his third play, An Audience with Miss Hobhouse, which is the first of his works to be produced on stage two years ago that saw him noticed in playwrighting circles.

Jackman is in Cape Town to celebrate his 60th birthday with friends and family, but also to start marketing his latest work, the drama Cape of Rebels.

It has been invited onto the Arena Stage at this year’s National Arts Festival. Funded by the festival, this particular space bridges the Main and Fringe festivals and producers who win Ovation Awards (as Jackman did for An Audience with Miss Hobhouse in 2013) are invited to submit for the Arena Stage.

Jackman submitted his play at the last minute, so was very pleasantly surprised to get a positive response from the festival. But, now the hard work starts. Christopher Weare will again direct Jackman’s play (he also tackled An Audience) and four actors will play six characters.

The action is set between two different places – the Koopmans De Wet House on Strand Street and the Cafe Royal on Church Street which would become the site of the Press Club – and between two different times.

The play explores two parallel periods of unrest – the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902 and the Struggle years of the late 1980s to early 1990s. At both times the media were suppressed and journalists found underground means to get the news out to the world.

Through the experiences of then young reporter, C Louis Leipold (to be played by Carel Nel); staunch boer supporter, Marie Koopmans de Wet (Cintaine Schutte); eldest daughter of liberal John Molteno, headmistress Betty Molteno (Larica Schnell); and teacher Alice Greene (Skye Russell) we get to know the Cape Clutch, a collective of writers who wrote “dissident” poetry. This was published in Europe and America to tell people what was happening to the Cape Rebels at the hands of the British forces.

Schnell and Russell also play two contemporary journalists telling the Press Club how they used to report stories in the ’80s and ‘90s.

Jackman wrote Cape of Rebels seated at the kitchen table, while his wife was working on her first novel in the next room. The two of them recently opened Schreiner’s Bistro and Tearoom in Cradock, but at heart they are writers through and through.

Some of the lines that will be uttered by the C Louis Leipold character are very much a window into how Jackman thinks: “More than any other character on stage, he represents the writer and I suppose he represents me more than anyone else in the play, not that it has anything to do with me. But, he says things I want him to say and I like the way he says them.”

Jackman says the two present-day journalists are drawn from characteristics of people he knows, though not any one specific person.

Still, “Megan could be recognisable, it’s a type. It’s the hard-arsed, outspoken, Struggle journalist, comfortable in their own skin, who knows who they are, never shy, knows what they stand for, saying things like they are. It’s a type. I knew several people like that.”

• Cape of Rebels, at The Hangar at NAF, July 2 and 3 at 7pm, July 4 at 6.30pm, July 5 at 12.30pm, and July 6 at 7pm.

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