A NEW musical written by David Kramer is always a thrilling prospect.
The internationally renowned director’s latest production, Langarm, which opens at The Fugard Theatre on November 20, is set in a hotel in District Six in the 1960s, a time when ballroom dancing was very popular.
The Fugard is in the remnants of District Six and this makes for a fascinating interplay between the setting in the musical and the site of the theatre.
Langarm (literally “long arm” in Afrikaans, because of the positions of dancer’s arms) is a form of ballroom dancing popular from the 1930s in District Six. Kramer has chosen the title deliberately, using term langarm as an allusion to the “long arm of the law” - the apartheid laws which shattered the lives of ordinary people.
The musical opens on Victory Day 1945, to provide a context of what was to occur. World War II was over, but three years into this post-liberation period of hope, the political situation in South Africa changed when the National Party under Herzog came to power. The long arm of the law was gaining momentum. Laws promulgated in the 1950s began to be enforced in the 1960s.
In Langarm (set between 1965 and 1966), the widow of a Jewish hotel owner, Dinah Levin (Kim Louis) inherits the (fictional) Canterbury Hotel in District Six.
She takes in her nephew Jeffrey, who has been living in Johannesburg and is gutted by a broken engagement. He meets Angelina, who is using the Canterbury’s old ballroom to rehearse for a dance competition in Swaziland.
When he agrees to help her prepare, the long arm of the apartheid racial laws intervenes.
Kramer: “The law devastated people’s lives. I think many young people today don’t realise the ramifications of the racial laws that were passed and what people had to do to survive.”
The idea for Langarm goes back years, when Kramer and his writing/musical partner, the late Taliep Petersen, riffed ideas off one another.
As a child growing up in Worcester, Kramer had been intrigued watching his parents dancing sokkie-sokkie at the local yacht club. With Petersen, the frame of langarm - referencing the District Six era - was mooted. The idea popped up again recently and Kramer decided to place the story in the rundown Canterbury Hotel to highlight the culture of Jewish-run hotels and boarding houses in District Six.
Canterbury Road is a few blocks from the Fugard Theatre. There might well have been a Canterbury Hotel down the road.
That sets up a heightened sense of the term “site responsive”. In 2018, here is Kramer, evoking the richly textured milieu of District Six in a theatre on the edge of what remains of a vibrant community.
“We are telling a story which could have played out here in the 1960s. It’s about family; about people who lived in the 1960s, in District Six, under the long arm of the law, trying to survive.”
There was anguish but there was joy, and through dance there was the possibility of transcending circumstances and challenges through friendships and love.
* Tickets from R150 to R260 through the Fugard Theatre box office on 0214614554 or www.thefugard.com.