Listening to rather than watching a show at Grahamstown a few years back, I wasn’t excited by the script, but the music was wonderfully haunting and lingered long after the play was forgotten.
It was the work of a young Braam du Toit (pictured), who was starting to feature in many of the Cape theatre productions of directors like Marthinus Basson and Jaco Bouwer.
He was 16 when he composed his first piece of music, but still feels embarrassed when people ask him what he does. And yet, anyone who hears his amazing contribution in Marlene van Niekerk’s Die Kortstondige Raklewe van Anastasia W, which premiered at Aardklop last year and features at the KKNK this year, will know this is an astonishing artist at work.
Directed by Basson, Die Kortstondige Raklewe van Anastasia W is a major production overwhelming the first time you see it. What helps you navigate the initial onslaught is the music.
“It was the most intense piece I have ever worked on,” says Du Toit.
He notes that Jaco Bouwer’s illuminating Smag and now Anastasia are two personal highlights.
The way he works with text is to give it one reading and then allow the message to infiltrate his head and, hopefully, the music. “I do this without seeing rehearsals,” he says.
Obviously with Van Niekerk’s musical theatre text, the words became more significant. He had worked with her poetry when he was younger, but this was a tougher ask.
“She absolutely considered the composer when she wrote,” he says. “Many of the choices I made were almost automatic, as if guided by Marlene. I could feel the atmosphere in the language she used almost as if creating an imaginary country. I tried to give the music a feeling of belonging to that landscape.”
And that’s why the music so magnificently anchors the piece.
He also joined forces with Mr Cat and the Jackal who wrote some of the songs and combined resources for some of the incidental music. This was much more about colour and texture and introducing unusual instruments to add to the depth and richness of the score.
The other major piece he composed for at this year’s festival is Nicola Hanekom’s Lot, which is hugely anticipated because of the success of last year’s Betesda. This was the actresses’s first venture as director/writer where she is establishing a name from the word go. In both instances, Du Toit has been her go-to musician.
“I’ve been wilder with my approach to this one,” he says about Lot which, for Hanekom, is the second part in a trilogy of sorts.
Reading the text the first time, he instinctively knew where he wanted to go musically.
Because of the avant garde nature of the this kind of work, it allowed him to experiment with music that’s different and, hopefully, new. “I wanted to create a new kind of sound,” he explains. It’s an organic process and he lends his ear to nature with sounds of birds, the rush of water, the crashing of wind as well as a Hindu god with many arms that change into many voices.
Listening to Du Toit speak about the way he works with text also speaks about his artistry, the way his imagination runs riot and how he adds to the production rather than stands apart from it. He is working in a field where he has little mentorship, although he credits Peter Klatzow in his earlier years.
Other festival productions that feature his music are London Road, Die Sendeling and a song based on a Donal W Riekert poem, Gebed tot die Aardvark.
Two weeks before the festival, a Du Toit symphony for bass and alto flute was performed by the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra in collaboration with rapper Tumi Molekane and multi-instumentalist Peach van Pletzen.
“It was a daunting experience,” admits Du Toit of working with a live orchestra, “but I loved it and am seriously thinking about opera as a future project.”
He talks about the ephemeral nature of theatre music probably because it is integrated with a particular production and yet it is as difficult to compose. That’s another reason he has lost his heart to Anastasia’s music, which can be performed as a concert piece at a later date.
So when in a next production you are swept away by the music to a place the director hopes to take you, remember that this is yet another dimension that adds to the sensory experience of live theatre.
lDie Kortstondige Raklewe van Anastasia W will be playing at Stellenbosch’s HB Thom Teater from April 12 to 16.