When she first started acting back in 1974, Jana Cilliers was told she should think about going into film because her voice was so small, projecting could a problem.
She not only did that, but also got involved in the then nascent local television industry, helping to establish a strong body of Afrikaans drama. She worked on, among others, the first Afrikaans drama Dokter, Dokter, Salome (“I did that major production in Studio 1 with 10 million live animals and snakes and crocodiles en goed wat rondegespring het. We were slightly overshadowed”), Arende, Egoli and Binnelanders for tv; and films like Plekkie in die Son, The Good Fascist and ’n Pot Vol Winter.
But, it is as a stage actress that she has received the most recognition and awards like a Fleur du Cap as Maria Callas in Master Class (1996) or the one she is most proud of, Opdrag: Ingrid Jonker.
More recently she trained for four years to be an Alexander Technique teacher, qualifying in 2007, “in between working and doing 10 million projects. I felt quite chuffed that I could qualify in something that was my heart’s request so that one day when I’m old I could actually teach and be a decent teacher. It’s subtle, refined, very useful. I’m not a very esoteric creature,” she says about the educational process.
“We’re always thinking, ‘I have to do this for the year, or that project’ and it plays out of itself. I’m lucky to be remembered for various things, for the diversity. I often yearned for the theatre more, that’s why I do a production like this, macbeth.slapeloos.”
The 64-year-old has worked in Joburg and Cape Town on one-person shows, in ensembles and through Opdrag Productions, a company she started with Mark Graham (“We wanted to be tweetalig.”)
A self-described homebody who is based in Joburg, Cilliers is nevertheless spending a lot more time in Cape Town because this is where her now 3-and-a-half-year-old grandson lives.
She has only ever worked on two contractual gigs in her 40-year career (once for Kruik in the ’70s and for Binnelanders Sub Judice more recently), but the rest of the time she has been a freelancer.
Since macbeth.slapeloos has a just more than three-week run, this gives her and her fellow actors some time to really sink their teeth into their roles.
This is not the first Shakespeare she has worked on with director Marthinus Basson. She played Ariel to Antoinette Kellermann’s Prospero in his Die Storm (The Tempest), and this time she is Karakter A (while Kellermann plays the king).
“It’s to introduce a representation of the vox pop and we all fit in somewhere, as thinking, contributing creatures,” she explained her role.
Cilliers, Dawid Minnaar (Macbeth) and Anna-Mart van der Merwe (Lady Macbeth) start the play trading the lines normally attributed to The Witches. Using Eitemal’s Afrikaans translation, Basson has eschewed the esoteric witchy aspect, grounding the tragedy in a a reality where the characters are shown to have a choice in their actions. Nine actors play all the various characters in the play.
“Karakter A represents a certain moral fibre, maybe. Although I often see her more as an observer, like a child is an observer, in a curious way. You know what’s going to happen, but you keep hoping, wishing for the outcome to be different. So that’s why she says in the beginning: ‘When shall we meet again?’ It’s like being in a session somewhere, ‘have we settled the issue?’ ‘You won the battle, but you’ve also lost.’”
“It’s important because otherwise we tend to blame this or say: ‘it’s because of that’ and that’s what I like about this Macbeth character. He engages with the audience, not saying: ‘this is not happening to me’ in a supernatural way, he says: ‘this is my reality, this is what happened. What would you have done?’
“Hence, probably the whole ensemble, we are ourselves though we are portraying characters, and we are also participating in a kind of dream which is more of a nightmare because the outcome is kind or easy.
“What lives on, we ask.”
On stage she is “constantly oscillating between being ahead of him (Macbeth) and giving him the benefit of the doubt,” as she shadows the lead character throughout the play, observing him in the hope that he will change.
Cilliers is very complimentary of Basson’s admonishment that they should not play the plot to only provide information, since the word is the information and most audiences know how this story plays out.
“The agenda of why this needs to be said is often more important for the audience, so they can also engage.”
• macbeth.slapeloos runs at the Baxter Theatre until Wednesday.