FEATURED: THEATRE PRACTITIONER GUY DE LANCEY ON LIGHT AS THOUGHT AND THE BINDING PROBLEM.
Featured: Theatre Practitioner Guy de Lancey on Light as Thought and the Binding Problem. Written by Gabriella Pinto on September 29, 2015 in Featured, Interviews, Theatre
Guy de Lancey is an award-winning producer, editor, cinematographer, photographer, light and set designer as well as an actor. At the heart of all his pursuits, which span a variety of roles in theatre, film and TV, is the art of storytelling. Earlier this year, he was nominated for a Fleur du Cap for Best Supporting Actor and Best Lighting Design (together with Luke Ellenbogen) for his involvement in Louis Viljoen‘s The Pervert Laura.
He studied at Rhodes University, New York University and Benetton’s Fabrica Arts and Communication Research Centre and his recent directing, acting and design credits include; Shakespeare’s King Lear (This time it Hurts), Urban Death, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Highway Crossing, As You Like It, Glengary Glen Ross and Through the Looking Glass. Guy is often vocal about the inequalities present in the South African theatre industry and doesn’t shy away from expressing scepticism when it comes to artistic accolades or the nature of creative institutions.
You have a multifaceted career spanning TV, film, documentaries, commercials and theatre work. All of these mediums focus on storytelling. What compels you to create, share and tell stories?
The understanding that, even in neuroscience, what is called ‘the binding problem’ describes how the brain (body) assembles raw data from essentially unconnected peripheral inputs, and combines these to produce continuity and meaning. That essentially, there is no one at home, but the stories we tell ourselves.
Initially, you started in theatre. What drew you to performance and how did your career interests evolve from stage to screen?
Performance is a way of expressing the binding problem. Mathematically, it is a higher more complex set of variables. My maths teacher hated me. In a school one act play festival, he saw there were other possibilities, and shared that recognition. Evolve? I noticed that most theatre practitioners had been obedience trained. To the point of reducing their capacities as story-tellers, to pleasing the invisible drama teacher that ruined them, or an absent parent. A sort of very narrow bandwidth therapy. The screen offered a way broadening the experience of storytelling, and becoming intimate with very with modern techniques of narrative, in a contemporary art form. The screen also functioned as a thought machine. Interdisciplinary blending of theatre and cinema techniques, not only material, but conceptual became interesting.
Who or what has been most influential to your aesthetic sensibility?
The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Constant meditation on the importance in the idea of ‘what comes next?’
Lighting design is like visual poetry. One’s prompted to think about illuminating the subject or space but what can you say about working with darkness?
That is exactly the point. One evolves toward an understanding that lighting is done with shadows, not light. Diegetically, technically, performatively. It is a question of depth in imagination. Not signposting ones obedience trained compensatory behaviour towards the sanctioned flourish.
What is the guiding principle when it comes to conceptualizing theatre and lighting design?
What is the story about? Where are its tensions? What is its temperature? How should it feel? Remember it’s a theatre. Not reality. Abstract the idea. Use the space. Leave front of house lighting to those with the mentality and skill set of an airline steward. Light is thought. Simplicity.
On occasion, you have been both the director and designer. What comes first, the urge to direct or design and how does one process inform the other?
They are the same thing. There are no urges. Urges end up being attention seeking. And are old reflexes intended to please the drama teacher. Or get him off your back. A director designs a theatre or film piece. An actor designs a performance. A designer designs an atmospheric arrangement of affects. It is instrumental, toward the same end. Arranging thoughts to effect through story.
What misconceptions do people have when it comes to lighting?
Actors need to be seen. Doing ‘theatre lighting’.
Design wise, which projects are especially memorable to you and why?
King Lear. The simplicity of the gravel. Not only as material, but as texture, as virtual space, as audial comment, as obstacle, as literary sign. “Lear: You are men of stone”.
Theatre design is a small, niche industry. What are some of the obstacles facing designers and how do you think they can be overcome?
I think it’s a smaller industry than that. Like theatre itself it’s a cottage industry. Obstacles facing designers are thinking literally, gatekeeper administrators, established theatres, the notion of ‘representation’ in art, the Fleur du Cap awards, references to television ‘hit’ shows, directors who think they can design, not having travelled much, the theatre itself. Forget theatre.
Are you working on anything at the moment that we can look forward to?
Watching gifted theatre practitioners turn into hype-sucking fools. Sedition.
Follow Guy on Instagram.
Guy de Lancey is an award-winning producer, editor, cinematographer, photographer, light and set designer as well as an actor. At the heart of all his pursuits, which span a variety of roles in theatre, film and TV, is the art of storytelling. Earlier this year, he was nominated for a Fleur du Cap for Best Supporting Actor and Best Lighting Design (together with Luke Ellenbogen) for his involvement in Louis Viljoen‘s The Pervert Laura.
He studied at Rhodes University, New York University and Benetton’s Fabrica Arts and Communication Research Centre and his recent directing, acting and design credits include; Shakespeare’s King Lear (This time it Hurts), Urban Death, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Highway Crossing, As You Like It, Glengary Glen Ross and Through the Looking Glass. Guy is often vocal about the inequalities present in the South African theatre industry and doesn’t shy away from expressing scepticism when it comes to artistic accolades or the nature of creative institutions.
You have a multifaceted career spanning TV, film, documentaries, commercials and theatre work. All of these mediums focus on storytelling. What compels you to create, share and tell stories?
The understanding that, even in neuroscience, what is called ‘the binding problem’ describes how the brain (body) assembles raw data from essentially unconnected peripheral inputs, and combines these to produce continuity and meaning. That essentially, there is no one at home, but the stories we tell ourselves.
Initially, you started in theatre. What drew you to performance and how did your career interests evolve from stage to screen?
Performance is a way of expressing the binding problem. Mathematically, it is a higher more complex set of variables. My maths teacher hated me. In a school one act play festival, he saw there were other possibilities, and shared that recognition. Evolve? I noticed that most theatre practitioners had been obedience trained. To the point of reducing their capacities as story-tellers, to pleasing the invisible drama teacher that ruined them, or an absent parent. A sort of very narrow bandwidth therapy. The screen offered a way broadening the experience of storytelling, and becoming intimate with very with modern techniques of narrative, in a contemporary art form. The screen also functioned as a thought machine. Interdisciplinary blending of theatre and cinema techniques, not only material, but conceptual became interesting.
Who or what has been most influential to your aesthetic sensibility?
The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Constant meditation on the importance in the idea of ‘what comes next?’
Lighting design is like visual poetry. One’s prompted to think about illuminating the subject or space but what can you say about working with darkness?
That is exactly the point. One evolves toward an understanding that lighting is done with shadows, not light. Diegetically, technically, performatively. It is a question of depth in imagination. Not signposting ones obedience trained compensatory behaviour towards the sanctioned flourish.
What is the guiding principle when it comes to conceptualizing theatre and lighting design?
What is the story about? Where are its tensions? What is its temperature? How should it feel? Remember it’s a theatre. Not reality. Abstract the idea. Use the space. Leave front of house lighting to those with the mentality and skill set of an airline steward. Light is thought. Simplicity.
On occasion, you have been both the director and designer. What comes first, the urge to direct or design and how does one process inform the other?
They are the same thing. There are no urges. Urges end up being attention seeking. And are old reflexes intended to please the drama teacher. Or get him off your back. A director designs a theatre or film piece. An actor designs a performance. A designer designs an atmospheric arrangement of affects. It is instrumental, toward the same end. Arranging thoughts to effect through story.
What misconceptions do people have when it comes to lighting?
Actors need to be seen. Doing ‘theatre lighting’.
Design wise, which projects are especially memorable to you and why?
King Lear. The simplicity of the gravel. Not only as material, but as texture, as virtual space, as audial comment, as obstacle, as literary sign. “Lear: You are men of stone”.
Theatre design is a small, niche industry. What are some of the obstacles facing designers and how do you think they can be overcome?
I think it’s a smaller industry than that. Like theatre itself it’s a cottage industry. Obstacles facing designers are thinking literally, gatekeeper administrators, established theatres, the notion of ‘representation’ in art, the Fleur du Cap awards, references to television ‘hit’ shows, directors who think they can design, not having travelled much, the theatre itself. Forget theatre.
Are you working on anything at the moment that we can look forward to?
Watching gifted theatre practitioners turn into hype-sucking fools. Sedition.
Follow Guy on Instagram.
The Interview Series #4: Guy de Lancey on Performing Shakespeare in South Africa
Can you tell us a bit about your interest in Shakespeare and what prompts it?
I think Shakespeare is contemporary performance. The notion that it is old English, or the way it is advocated for as ‘heightened speech’, is misleading. The point is: Shakespearean English is a young language. Approached with that in mind, staging Shakespeare becomes a fascinating contemporary experience. Being a foreigner in one’s own language is the starting point of discovery. Shakespeare for me is very much about discovery. It is layered thought and articulation about human behaviour that transcends a particular time and place, yet transmits something of that time and place, as any time, or any place.
There are many ready-made, pre-packaged notions of what Shakespeare is, or ought to be, particularly in English, or theatre academia, and the Anglo world of Shakespeare performance, even to the point of ‘innovation’ in Shakespeare performance looking and smelling like an ineffectual ‘rebranding of the same old thing’ – the received Shakespearean canon – that is as manufactured as any attempt to dress it up on the surface as contemporaneous. Strained stylistic augmentations have more to do with reheated ‘directorial vision’ than discovery or illumination. Shakespeare himself makes a mockery of all this. When you get past all the pretension about the canon, heightened speech, old English, fashionable or unfashionable critical reverence for the text, you see a living, breathing thing.
Shakespeare ... is layered thought and articulation about human behaviour that transcends a particular time and place, yet transmits something of that time and place, as any time, or any place.
You have produced A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2011) and King Lear (2012) with your theatre group, The Mechanicals. Were those attempts from your side to do it differently, to respond to other productions you’d seen and been involved in?
Yes. Other productions were being done, on rote, by the same people with the same mediocre interpretive insights – either drama department academics or old hacks who had tenure in a system of patronage that had suffocated itself of any real inspiration into what could be done with Shakespeare. That hasn’t changed – other than they have truly ruined it for any intelligible paths of discovery from those who may have the proclivity for real risk in Shakespeare. Quite understandably so. Be that as it may, we will probably now enter a phase of ridiculously timid stylistic political correctness when it comes to the appointing of practitioners in the allocating of resources for Shakespeare staging, particularly at Maynardville, which to date is the largest resource. Doing Shakespeare ‘differently’ still seems to be configured either as a conceptual surface jig with the material or as being ‘representative’ in stupid costumes in interpreting the work. Diversity, for the sake for appeasement. Rather than real Difference. Risk.
The Shakespeare I had been involved in prior to attempting an alternative operated as idiotic summer school boot-camps, with questionable ‘drama school' techniques of interpretation, voice training, and a total lack of critical engagement with the text toward uncovering more than than the obvious, one-dimensional, cardboard cut-outs of character and motivation. A sort of off-the-peg, second-hand, watered down version of new historicism was pedalled. The insights seemed to come from SparkNotes, or Shakespeare for Dummies.
There is an article in the Daily Maverick by Marianne Thamm (link) in which she quotes Tom Lanoye, who says an interesting thing: that Anglo countries should be banned from doing Shakespeare for twenty years so that they can rediscover what it is. I kind of get that – I think banning it is a bit much – but yes.
What were the principles that informed the staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear?
The first ‘principle’, if one can call it that, was to be aware that most of what we had been taught or seen in Shakespeare performance was ‘received’, that is, passed down from decades of Shakespeare referenced to the ‘cosmopolitan center’. Even British Shakespeare now seems to ‘receive’ its own tradition of Shakespeare performance. The idea was to immediately look for opportunities to invert these received ideas, as a rehearsal tool, as an interpretative strategy, and an attempt to uncover character and motivation from an angle other than the obvious, other than the historical weight of stock references these characters carry. A variety of counter intuitive responses were sought to see what that might uncover for performance and insight into the deeper layers within the text – the text being a blue-print for the performance, not a canonical treatise. It was about breaking the scar tissue down of those received ideas, to get people to mean what they say: to speak to each other, and to react honestly to what happens.
The attitude that Shakespeare could possibly have been one of the earliest ‘screenwriters’ was adopted. So ‘Exeunt’ became ‘cut’, and ‘contemporary time’ itself, not historical time, played an important part in interpreting rhythm, character, motivation, subtext, context, style, design, and use of language.
It was about breaking the scar tissue down of those received ideas, to get people to mean what they say: to speak to each other, and to react honestly to what happens.
So we found the right actors, we found the right rehearsal techniques to find the characters, and from that we could see moves and styles develop. The group of people involved in The Mechanicals were willing to put their time and exploration into something that grew organically. I think a director is just an immune system – you’re not an authority figure. With King Lear, our Edgar ended up strangling the fool. He said, ‘I want to strangle the fool’, and I said, ‘why do you want to do that?’, and he said, ‘because I want his clothes’. It was an actor choice, and he justified it in a way that was interesting, so that’s how we did it.
I think a director is just an immune system – you're not an authority figure.
How have you experienced the engagement of South African audiences with Shakespeare, to your own productions of Shakespeare?
The audiences that engaged with our productions of Shakespeare were very positive and affirming in stating that they had never seen Shakespeare interpreted in that way. Whatever that meant. They were also highly encouraging in requesting to see more of it in the same vein.
However, without the resources to continue doing so, it became increasingly difficult. The resources for Shakespeare production, particularly in Cape Town, kept going to the same people doing the same thing. That has not changed with the reshuffling of executive management that has stewardship of those resources, other than an attempt to window dress a form of politically correct ‘representative’ mediocrity in Shakespeare interpretation for the stage.
Apart from quite a broad range of appreciation from theatre goers, our own productions were basically ignored by the theatre establishments, and some of the best Shakespeare performances I have seen from actors, delivered through their own initiative and commitment to the idea of inverting everything they had been ‘taught’, are ignored by the discerning awards system in Cape Town. So a mixture of engaged appreciation, and insecure threat would characterize audience engagement to the work done.
If you were to think about plays you’d want to do in future, which ones appeal to you?
I could just latch on to any one of them. I’ve realized now you can dive into any one of them, and you will find something - something will be uncovered from the reading, the experience of the actors. I think we deserve a Hamlet that hasn’t been done in a certain way before.
Thinking about the future – ideally – what would Shakespeare’s place be in the South African performance landscape?
I am not sure of Shakespeare in the South African performance landscape. The big thing now is de-colonisation, and you’ve got to get past that first before you get to how you’re going to put it in place. Shakespeare should be demythologized, as should most theatre training, because in most cases those doing the ‘educating’ are faking it and have no idea what they are talking about.
Shakespeare should be demythologized, as should most theatre training.
I have witnessed school children come alive to Shakespeare when they discover that speaking Shakespeare is not unlike doing rap, something close to their experience and understanding in how language can function poetically and contemporaneously at the same time. Perhaps it’s as simple as that. Get it out of the clutches of comfortable, salaried drama school academics, and into the schools as plastic material that can be shaped by one's own hand without the ‘guidance’ of ‘those in the know’.
Do you have a personal favourite moment or piece of dialogue in Shakespeare?
The first line of Hamlet:
‘Who’s there?’
I think Shakespeare is contemporary performance. The notion that it is old English, or the way it is advocated for as ‘heightened speech’, is misleading. The point is: Shakespearean English is a young language. Approached with that in mind, staging Shakespeare becomes a fascinating contemporary experience. Being a foreigner in one’s own language is the starting point of discovery. Shakespeare for me is very much about discovery. It is layered thought and articulation about human behaviour that transcends a particular time and place, yet transmits something of that time and place, as any time, or any place.
There are many ready-made, pre-packaged notions of what Shakespeare is, or ought to be, particularly in English, or theatre academia, and the Anglo world of Shakespeare performance, even to the point of ‘innovation’ in Shakespeare performance looking and smelling like an ineffectual ‘rebranding of the same old thing’ – the received Shakespearean canon – that is as manufactured as any attempt to dress it up on the surface as contemporaneous. Strained stylistic augmentations have more to do with reheated ‘directorial vision’ than discovery or illumination. Shakespeare himself makes a mockery of all this. When you get past all the pretension about the canon, heightened speech, old English, fashionable or unfashionable critical reverence for the text, you see a living, breathing thing.
Shakespeare ... is layered thought and articulation about human behaviour that transcends a particular time and place, yet transmits something of that time and place, as any time, or any place.
You have produced A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2011) and King Lear (2012) with your theatre group, The Mechanicals. Were those attempts from your side to do it differently, to respond to other productions you’d seen and been involved in?
Yes. Other productions were being done, on rote, by the same people with the same mediocre interpretive insights – either drama department academics or old hacks who had tenure in a system of patronage that had suffocated itself of any real inspiration into what could be done with Shakespeare. That hasn’t changed – other than they have truly ruined it for any intelligible paths of discovery from those who may have the proclivity for real risk in Shakespeare. Quite understandably so. Be that as it may, we will probably now enter a phase of ridiculously timid stylistic political correctness when it comes to the appointing of practitioners in the allocating of resources for Shakespeare staging, particularly at Maynardville, which to date is the largest resource. Doing Shakespeare ‘differently’ still seems to be configured either as a conceptual surface jig with the material or as being ‘representative’ in stupid costumes in interpreting the work. Diversity, for the sake for appeasement. Rather than real Difference. Risk.
The Shakespeare I had been involved in prior to attempting an alternative operated as idiotic summer school boot-camps, with questionable ‘drama school' techniques of interpretation, voice training, and a total lack of critical engagement with the text toward uncovering more than than the obvious, one-dimensional, cardboard cut-outs of character and motivation. A sort of off-the-peg, second-hand, watered down version of new historicism was pedalled. The insights seemed to come from SparkNotes, or Shakespeare for Dummies.
There is an article in the Daily Maverick by Marianne Thamm (link) in which she quotes Tom Lanoye, who says an interesting thing: that Anglo countries should be banned from doing Shakespeare for twenty years so that they can rediscover what it is. I kind of get that – I think banning it is a bit much – but yes.
What were the principles that informed the staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear?
The first ‘principle’, if one can call it that, was to be aware that most of what we had been taught or seen in Shakespeare performance was ‘received’, that is, passed down from decades of Shakespeare referenced to the ‘cosmopolitan center’. Even British Shakespeare now seems to ‘receive’ its own tradition of Shakespeare performance. The idea was to immediately look for opportunities to invert these received ideas, as a rehearsal tool, as an interpretative strategy, and an attempt to uncover character and motivation from an angle other than the obvious, other than the historical weight of stock references these characters carry. A variety of counter intuitive responses were sought to see what that might uncover for performance and insight into the deeper layers within the text – the text being a blue-print for the performance, not a canonical treatise. It was about breaking the scar tissue down of those received ideas, to get people to mean what they say: to speak to each other, and to react honestly to what happens.
The attitude that Shakespeare could possibly have been one of the earliest ‘screenwriters’ was adopted. So ‘Exeunt’ became ‘cut’, and ‘contemporary time’ itself, not historical time, played an important part in interpreting rhythm, character, motivation, subtext, context, style, design, and use of language.
It was about breaking the scar tissue down of those received ideas, to get people to mean what they say: to speak to each other, and to react honestly to what happens.
So we found the right actors, we found the right rehearsal techniques to find the characters, and from that we could see moves and styles develop. The group of people involved in The Mechanicals were willing to put their time and exploration into something that grew organically. I think a director is just an immune system – you’re not an authority figure. With King Lear, our Edgar ended up strangling the fool. He said, ‘I want to strangle the fool’, and I said, ‘why do you want to do that?’, and he said, ‘because I want his clothes’. It was an actor choice, and he justified it in a way that was interesting, so that’s how we did it.
I think a director is just an immune system – you're not an authority figure.
How have you experienced the engagement of South African audiences with Shakespeare, to your own productions of Shakespeare?
The audiences that engaged with our productions of Shakespeare were very positive and affirming in stating that they had never seen Shakespeare interpreted in that way. Whatever that meant. They were also highly encouraging in requesting to see more of it in the same vein.
However, without the resources to continue doing so, it became increasingly difficult. The resources for Shakespeare production, particularly in Cape Town, kept going to the same people doing the same thing. That has not changed with the reshuffling of executive management that has stewardship of those resources, other than an attempt to window dress a form of politically correct ‘representative’ mediocrity in Shakespeare interpretation for the stage.
Apart from quite a broad range of appreciation from theatre goers, our own productions were basically ignored by the theatre establishments, and some of the best Shakespeare performances I have seen from actors, delivered through their own initiative and commitment to the idea of inverting everything they had been ‘taught’, are ignored by the discerning awards system in Cape Town. So a mixture of engaged appreciation, and insecure threat would characterize audience engagement to the work done.
If you were to think about plays you’d want to do in future, which ones appeal to you?
I could just latch on to any one of them. I’ve realized now you can dive into any one of them, and you will find something - something will be uncovered from the reading, the experience of the actors. I think we deserve a Hamlet that hasn’t been done in a certain way before.
Thinking about the future – ideally – what would Shakespeare’s place be in the South African performance landscape?
I am not sure of Shakespeare in the South African performance landscape. The big thing now is de-colonisation, and you’ve got to get past that first before you get to how you’re going to put it in place. Shakespeare should be demythologized, as should most theatre training, because in most cases those doing the ‘educating’ are faking it and have no idea what they are talking about.
Shakespeare should be demythologized, as should most theatre training.
I have witnessed school children come alive to Shakespeare when they discover that speaking Shakespeare is not unlike doing rap, something close to their experience and understanding in how language can function poetically and contemporaneously at the same time. Perhaps it’s as simple as that. Get it out of the clutches of comfortable, salaried drama school academics, and into the schools as plastic material that can be shaped by one's own hand without the ‘guidance’ of ‘those in the know’.
Do you have a personal favourite moment or piece of dialogue in Shakespeare?
The first line of Hamlet:
‘Who’s there?’
PLEASE TOUCH ME ON MY SHAKESPEARE: DAILY MAVERICK
For almost sixty years Capetonians have supported the annual summer production of Shakespeare at the open-air theatre in Maynardville. Each year things get um, rather Shakespearean, with charges of racism, sexism, misogyny and nepotism, as well as complaints about funding and the selection of work. However, cutbacks have resulted in this year’s production being determined by the school setwork, “The Tragedy of Othello”. Quo vadis this institutionalised manifestation of Shakespeare in Cape Town? By MARIANNE THAMM.
It began sometime last week with a round-robin email by one of the city’s veteran performers Graham Weir to fellow theatre practitioners, theatre critics, directors and the board of the state-funded Artscape inquiring as to how the decision to stage Othello for the 2014/15 Maynardville open air-theatre Shakespeare season came to pass.
Because the production involves public funding, Weir enquired, among other issues, as to how productions are chosen, who selected the directors and whether auditions or castings took place.
Capetonians have supported the annual staging in Wynberg Park for around sixty years – not without regular controversy - but the event, which has become an “institution” on the city’s summer theatre calendar, is now under threat as The Maynardville Trust, established in the 1990s to ensure the event’s future has all but been abandoned.
And so it was that Abrahamse and Meyer Productions (or AM Productions), a theatre company established by veteran theatre producer and director Fred Abrahamse and his partner, Marcel Meyer, in 2006 were contracted by Artscape in October to stage this year’s Maynardville offering.
AM Productions, surprisingly considering the current bleak theatre landscape in South Africa, has successfully produced and mounted at least a dozen stagings since then, including several Shakespeares, Tennessee Williams, two original musicals as well as various other works.
Be that as it may, Weir wanted to (rightly) know how AM Productions had come to land the Maynardville gig, how it was that Meyer was cast in the chunky role of Iago, how AM were also selected as the costume and set designers, whether Abrahamse and Meyer collected “multiple salaries”, whether they had invested any of their own funds in the production and also if they would receive a percentage of income from sales.
“As this production is jointly funded by Artscape, the Department of Arts and Culture and the Lotto - i.e. with public funds - we are entitled to some answers for clarity,” wrote Weir.
Indeed.
And clarity was soon offered by Artscape’s Director of Audience Development and Education, Marlene Le Roux, who responded that Artscape “is mandated by the National Government to manage and promote artistic work on the Artscape stages within its buildings. There is no current mandate, beyond rural outreach, that allows Artscape to present work in other venues unless further independent funding is secured.”
The annual Shakespeare at Maynardville, she pointed out “is an extremely expensive exercise” and is currently managed out of income generated from Artscape’s other business activities.
Essentially, then, with no sponsorship for Maynardville forthcoming, Artscape could not fund a separate production over and above its annual production of Shakespeare school setworks, usually performed later in the year and partially funded by the Department of Education.
And so the Shakespeare schools festival and the annual Maynardville were collapsed into one production. On Facebook via veteran actress Diane Wilson, director Roy Sargeant, a former Maynardville regular, filled in a few gaps.
Sargeant explained that because the trust had been effectively abandoned and no longer met and because of the recent attrition of experienced Artscape staff, including himself, producer Brian Heydenrych, as well as CEO, Michael Maas, management had suddenly found itself having to make a decision about Maynardville.
AM Productions had already approached Artscape earlier and had secured an agreement to produce Othello for the theatre’s schools programme, due to take place later in 2015.
“With me gone, Brian gone, Artscape management found itself with no one with any knowledge of how to go about producing Maynardville and certainly with no knowledge of the texts of the plays and the unique problems each play presents creatively to producers/directors/designers/actors. Producing Maynardville is a complex exercise. During October, Artscape management sensibly asked Brian to return freelance and to produce the 2015 Maynardville production. Good news. As I understand it, bad news, he was handed the AM Othello fait accompli, viz. Fred Abrahamse to direct (and light?), Marcel Meyer to play Iago and design costumes and set.”
Sargeant went on to opine, “Othello is really not the most attractive play in the canon for the general public and has never worked well at Maynardville (including my own 1982 production with a drunken late Robert Stephens, later still Sir Robert and, earlier, father of Toby Stephens).”
(We take it Stephens must have donned “blackface” in this production, but we’ll leave that one right there.)
Le Roux signed off her communication to Weir assuring him that “Artscape has continued to support Maynardville due to the belief that it is an extremely important tradition; to the cultural landscape of Cape Town, the arts industry and those working as creative practitioners and also to the schools and school learners who engage with Shakespeare in their curriculum”.
And here endeth act one of the annual Shakespeare controversy in Cape Town. The second act, however, is a much more interesting one and speaks to the very heart of Shakespeare and how his works should be presented in the 21st Century.
The audiences who have attended the annual Maynardville Shakespeare - which Chris Thurman, Associate Professor at University of the Witwatersrand, has questioned as a possibly “bourgeois indulgence, in light of the manifest evidence of socio-economic problems in our country” - have expected something safe and relatively middlebrow.
For several years now, innovative director, Guy de Lancey, has been circling the verdant Maynardville encampment prodding and provoking the “institution” for its lack of artistic vision and its myopic view of Shakespeare.
De Lancey responded to Weir’s public questions to Artscape with a valid criticism of how we, as South Africans, should go about engaging with Shakespeare in the 21st Century and how we should provide a platform for alternative visions and voices.
Celebrated Belgian author, poet and playwright, Tom Lanoye, who has adapted and translated Shakespeare for Flemish, Dutch, French, German and other European audiences, is of the opinion that the Anglo Saxon approach to Shakespeare tends to be conservative and traditional.
“Shakespeare’s work is regarded as a monument and any diversion as a graffiti tag on the edifice,” said Lanoye, speaking to the Daily Maverick in Cape Town.
Instead of using Shakespeare as a sort of “cultural, nationalistic monument”, said Lanoye, theatre makers should explore what the work brings to the contemporary world in terms of its “political, psychological and philosophical content”.
“So in the end, it all depends on what you expect from theatre. Do you expect art? Theatre is all about staging and not a literary repetition of what you once saw going to the Royal Shakespeare Company with your mom and dad. That is just reenacting. You can just reenact the battle of Waterloo and feel connected to that. But that is theme park theatre, it is Walt Disney for adults,” said Lanoye.
These are sentiments with which De Lancey agrees. His version of King Lear – This Time It Hurts, staged with The Mechanicals Repertory Company in the minute Intimate Theatre in 2012, was groundbreaking for its stark brutality, theatricality and artistic innovation. But despite a sold-out run, the production was not picked up by any larger mainstream theatre. So too his 2011 darkly comic interpretation A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
De Lancey has consistently argued for a much deeper and less populist and commercial approach to Shakespeare if the playwright’s work is to have any meaning or impact, particularly for younger audiences in a modern world. And he doesn’t just mean dressing up the text in Game Of Thrones-themed costumes or setting it in 1930s Italy.
“There have been countless discussions over the years, by intelligent, caring, critical, integrally creative, proactive people, after each production, about the consistency in feel, the sameness of the interpretive engagement with the material, the blandness or shallowness of the performance style, the narrowness of the casting strategy and the unimaginative aesthetic engagement and it's lack of diegetic synergy with the text. And time and again, the explanatory reply has been around the constraints of time, budgetary constraints, the constraints of bureaucracy, or any other peripheral material cause that serves to outline why things end up being the way they are for each production”.
However, it is the philosophical “entry point” into Shakespeare, the most important one, that is seldom broached or entertained artistically.
“And it is this that has compromised the development and progress of Maynardville as an exciting, progressive venue of Shakespeare exploration as contemporary performance, rather than a collection of received ideas around the staging of Shakespeare, that go unchallenged year after year, except in private conversations and thankfully prestigious academic and international theatre publications around Shakespeare and performance.”
Shakespeare, says De Lancey, is not only populist.
“It is denser and more exciting than that. And more thoroughly engaging and layered.”
And The Maynardville Trust, he adds, while it might have been well-meaning, was really “representative of the interests of post-colonial Shakespeare engagement”.
“The budget is the budget, the constraints are the constraints, but the creative and philosophical pool of talent that could make the event remarkable and competitive on an international level, has been rarified and narrowed, and any eco-system that does not engage with difference, variation, challenge, stagnates.”
The time has come, said De Lancey, to “recalibrate” Shakespeare in South Africa and to deliver plays of an international standard.
“One has the option to either live IN Africa or ON Africa. Maynardville caters to an audience that prefers to live ON Africa,” said De Lancey, adding: “Shakespeare is and should be ‘dangerous’ and exploratory to make it alive for schoolgoing audiences.”
Lanoye is of the view that Shakespeare, particularly in former colonial states like South Africa, is more about “people enacting that they are sitting in London watching part of a culture they think is still very important but that has, in my opinion, very little to do with Shakespeare.”
The playwright, who spends six months in Cape Town, has attended three Maynardville productions.
“It is not interesting to me. I know I am going to see a Shakespeare. Even when they think they are doing something modern, I am only seeing people reenacting what they think they should do, what they think is modern.”
Lanoye controversially jests that English speakers should be forbidden from reading or performing Shakespeare for 50 years.
“Can you imagine what it would be like to discover a writer like Shakespeare then, to find out how to play it without the baggage and the burden of You Tube or how a number of great actors like Richard Burton or Ian McKellan have performed it? It becomes more and more suffocating. This tradition that creates great actors also creates a terrible burden so that liberty of staging is less and less possible.”
So, perhaps then, there might be an upside to the woes facing Maynardville and its little Bardfest. Not so much a scorched earth, ground-zero policy but a real opportunity to turn away from the dim lights of habit and impulse and discover a Shakespeare still able to speak, through the ages. DM
Photo: William Shakespeare x 4
Marianne Thamm
It began sometime last week with a round-robin email by one of the city’s veteran performers Graham Weir to fellow theatre practitioners, theatre critics, directors and the board of the state-funded Artscape inquiring as to how the decision to stage Othello for the 2014/15 Maynardville open air-theatre Shakespeare season came to pass.
Because the production involves public funding, Weir enquired, among other issues, as to how productions are chosen, who selected the directors and whether auditions or castings took place.
Capetonians have supported the annual staging in Wynberg Park for around sixty years – not without regular controversy - but the event, which has become an “institution” on the city’s summer theatre calendar, is now under threat as The Maynardville Trust, established in the 1990s to ensure the event’s future has all but been abandoned.
And so it was that Abrahamse and Meyer Productions (or AM Productions), a theatre company established by veteran theatre producer and director Fred Abrahamse and his partner, Marcel Meyer, in 2006 were contracted by Artscape in October to stage this year’s Maynardville offering.
AM Productions, surprisingly considering the current bleak theatre landscape in South Africa, has successfully produced and mounted at least a dozen stagings since then, including several Shakespeares, Tennessee Williams, two original musicals as well as various other works.
Be that as it may, Weir wanted to (rightly) know how AM Productions had come to land the Maynardville gig, how it was that Meyer was cast in the chunky role of Iago, how AM were also selected as the costume and set designers, whether Abrahamse and Meyer collected “multiple salaries”, whether they had invested any of their own funds in the production and also if they would receive a percentage of income from sales.
“As this production is jointly funded by Artscape, the Department of Arts and Culture and the Lotto - i.e. with public funds - we are entitled to some answers for clarity,” wrote Weir.
Indeed.
And clarity was soon offered by Artscape’s Director of Audience Development and Education, Marlene Le Roux, who responded that Artscape “is mandated by the National Government to manage and promote artistic work on the Artscape stages within its buildings. There is no current mandate, beyond rural outreach, that allows Artscape to present work in other venues unless further independent funding is secured.”
The annual Shakespeare at Maynardville, she pointed out “is an extremely expensive exercise” and is currently managed out of income generated from Artscape’s other business activities.
Essentially, then, with no sponsorship for Maynardville forthcoming, Artscape could not fund a separate production over and above its annual production of Shakespeare school setworks, usually performed later in the year and partially funded by the Department of Education.
And so the Shakespeare schools festival and the annual Maynardville were collapsed into one production. On Facebook via veteran actress Diane Wilson, director Roy Sargeant, a former Maynardville regular, filled in a few gaps.
Sargeant explained that because the trust had been effectively abandoned and no longer met and because of the recent attrition of experienced Artscape staff, including himself, producer Brian Heydenrych, as well as CEO, Michael Maas, management had suddenly found itself having to make a decision about Maynardville.
AM Productions had already approached Artscape earlier and had secured an agreement to produce Othello for the theatre’s schools programme, due to take place later in 2015.
“With me gone, Brian gone, Artscape management found itself with no one with any knowledge of how to go about producing Maynardville and certainly with no knowledge of the texts of the plays and the unique problems each play presents creatively to producers/directors/designers/actors. Producing Maynardville is a complex exercise. During October, Artscape management sensibly asked Brian to return freelance and to produce the 2015 Maynardville production. Good news. As I understand it, bad news, he was handed the AM Othello fait accompli, viz. Fred Abrahamse to direct (and light?), Marcel Meyer to play Iago and design costumes and set.”
Sargeant went on to opine, “Othello is really not the most attractive play in the canon for the general public and has never worked well at Maynardville (including my own 1982 production with a drunken late Robert Stephens, later still Sir Robert and, earlier, father of Toby Stephens).”
(We take it Stephens must have donned “blackface” in this production, but we’ll leave that one right there.)
Le Roux signed off her communication to Weir assuring him that “Artscape has continued to support Maynardville due to the belief that it is an extremely important tradition; to the cultural landscape of Cape Town, the arts industry and those working as creative practitioners and also to the schools and school learners who engage with Shakespeare in their curriculum”.
And here endeth act one of the annual Shakespeare controversy in Cape Town. The second act, however, is a much more interesting one and speaks to the very heart of Shakespeare and how his works should be presented in the 21st Century.
The audiences who have attended the annual Maynardville Shakespeare - which Chris Thurman, Associate Professor at University of the Witwatersrand, has questioned as a possibly “bourgeois indulgence, in light of the manifest evidence of socio-economic problems in our country” - have expected something safe and relatively middlebrow.
For several years now, innovative director, Guy de Lancey, has been circling the verdant Maynardville encampment prodding and provoking the “institution” for its lack of artistic vision and its myopic view of Shakespeare.
De Lancey responded to Weir’s public questions to Artscape with a valid criticism of how we, as South Africans, should go about engaging with Shakespeare in the 21st Century and how we should provide a platform for alternative visions and voices.
Celebrated Belgian author, poet and playwright, Tom Lanoye, who has adapted and translated Shakespeare for Flemish, Dutch, French, German and other European audiences, is of the opinion that the Anglo Saxon approach to Shakespeare tends to be conservative and traditional.
“Shakespeare’s work is regarded as a monument and any diversion as a graffiti tag on the edifice,” said Lanoye, speaking to the Daily Maverick in Cape Town.
Instead of using Shakespeare as a sort of “cultural, nationalistic monument”, said Lanoye, theatre makers should explore what the work brings to the contemporary world in terms of its “political, psychological and philosophical content”.
“So in the end, it all depends on what you expect from theatre. Do you expect art? Theatre is all about staging and not a literary repetition of what you once saw going to the Royal Shakespeare Company with your mom and dad. That is just reenacting. You can just reenact the battle of Waterloo and feel connected to that. But that is theme park theatre, it is Walt Disney for adults,” said Lanoye.
These are sentiments with which De Lancey agrees. His version of King Lear – This Time It Hurts, staged with The Mechanicals Repertory Company in the minute Intimate Theatre in 2012, was groundbreaking for its stark brutality, theatricality and artistic innovation. But despite a sold-out run, the production was not picked up by any larger mainstream theatre. So too his 2011 darkly comic interpretation A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
De Lancey has consistently argued for a much deeper and less populist and commercial approach to Shakespeare if the playwright’s work is to have any meaning or impact, particularly for younger audiences in a modern world. And he doesn’t just mean dressing up the text in Game Of Thrones-themed costumes or setting it in 1930s Italy.
“There have been countless discussions over the years, by intelligent, caring, critical, integrally creative, proactive people, after each production, about the consistency in feel, the sameness of the interpretive engagement with the material, the blandness or shallowness of the performance style, the narrowness of the casting strategy and the unimaginative aesthetic engagement and it's lack of diegetic synergy with the text. And time and again, the explanatory reply has been around the constraints of time, budgetary constraints, the constraints of bureaucracy, or any other peripheral material cause that serves to outline why things end up being the way they are for each production”.
However, it is the philosophical “entry point” into Shakespeare, the most important one, that is seldom broached or entertained artistically.
“And it is this that has compromised the development and progress of Maynardville as an exciting, progressive venue of Shakespeare exploration as contemporary performance, rather than a collection of received ideas around the staging of Shakespeare, that go unchallenged year after year, except in private conversations and thankfully prestigious academic and international theatre publications around Shakespeare and performance.”
Shakespeare, says De Lancey, is not only populist.
“It is denser and more exciting than that. And more thoroughly engaging and layered.”
And The Maynardville Trust, he adds, while it might have been well-meaning, was really “representative of the interests of post-colonial Shakespeare engagement”.
“The budget is the budget, the constraints are the constraints, but the creative and philosophical pool of talent that could make the event remarkable and competitive on an international level, has been rarified and narrowed, and any eco-system that does not engage with difference, variation, challenge, stagnates.”
The time has come, said De Lancey, to “recalibrate” Shakespeare in South Africa and to deliver plays of an international standard.
“One has the option to either live IN Africa or ON Africa. Maynardville caters to an audience that prefers to live ON Africa,” said De Lancey, adding: “Shakespeare is and should be ‘dangerous’ and exploratory to make it alive for schoolgoing audiences.”
Lanoye is of the view that Shakespeare, particularly in former colonial states like South Africa, is more about “people enacting that they are sitting in London watching part of a culture they think is still very important but that has, in my opinion, very little to do with Shakespeare.”
The playwright, who spends six months in Cape Town, has attended three Maynardville productions.
“It is not interesting to me. I know I am going to see a Shakespeare. Even when they think they are doing something modern, I am only seeing people reenacting what they think they should do, what they think is modern.”
Lanoye controversially jests that English speakers should be forbidden from reading or performing Shakespeare for 50 years.
“Can you imagine what it would be like to discover a writer like Shakespeare then, to find out how to play it without the baggage and the burden of You Tube or how a number of great actors like Richard Burton or Ian McKellan have performed it? It becomes more and more suffocating. This tradition that creates great actors also creates a terrible burden so that liberty of staging is less and less possible.”
So, perhaps then, there might be an upside to the woes facing Maynardville and its little Bardfest. Not so much a scorched earth, ground-zero policy but a real opportunity to turn away from the dim lights of habit and impulse and discover a Shakespeare still able to speak, through the ages. DM
Photo: William Shakespeare x 4
Marianne Thamm
