/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/THEATRE-SOUTH AFRICA: Laughing at the Cruel Ironies of their Past

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ryan Lloyd Fortune

JOHANNESBURG, Feb 5 2002 (IPS) - The young black comedian Marc Lottering’s fan base extends from Cape Town to Johannesburg, Windhoek to London, Sydney to Vancouver and everywhere else South Africans gather to laugh at the cruel ironies of their past and present.

Across the somewhat tattered ‘Rainbow Nation’, as South Africa is known, filing clerks, factory workers and their bosses religiously record his sporadic television appearances, their children acquire new friends by imitating his theatrical alter egos on the playground.

His stage performances are guaranteed to sell out many weeks in advance and he has television executives and advertising agencies eating out of his hand.

His current show – Big Stakes and Slap Chips – has been a best seller for which bookings have to be made weeks in advance.

Lottering’s meteoric rise to national celebrity status is, however, a poor indicator of the revolution he has wrought, almost single-handedly, on the body of preconceptions and unspoken assumptions that have characterised theatre-making in post- apartheid South Africa.

For in a country as celebrity-starved as South Africa, even the worst kwaito music stars, the dumbest beauty queens and the most bumbling politicians tend to provoke mass adoration.

South Africa might have former President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, but the first winner of the local version of Big Brother (a reality TV programme) inspired his supporters by defecating in a garden and calling himself the last Bushman in the Cape.

What distinguishes Lottering’s celebrity from that of others afloat in the vacuous pop mainstream is that he has come to it by being resolutely himself.

A highly intelligent individual, he refuses to be held captive by any conventions of social class, upbringing, South Africa’s deep-rooted racial prejudices nor even by the traditional formulae of theatre and stand-up comedy.

While South Africa’s most famous stand-up funny man Pieter-Dirk Uys built his career on impersonating and satirising politicians, or creating larger-than-life alter egos, Lottering has breathed life into ordinary South Africans who have no qualms about speaking their minds.

Auntie Merle Abrahams is instantly recognisable as the devout churchgoer, with a very refined sense of her place in the hierarchy of social class. Galatia Geduld is in passionate pursuit of her dream to become the next international pop diva.

Smiley is a charmingly vulgar minibus taxi attendant. Travis, a pill-popping teenage raver, is always on the lookout for his next sexual conquest, and Colleen is a brash supermarket cashier who operates by the dictum that the customer is always wrong, if not downright wicked.

That all of them also happen to be coloured – mixed-race people whose cultural distinctiveness was latched upon by the apartheid state as a mechanism to ‘divide and rule’ the black population – has been neither here nor there.

A Lottering show is not a song and dance evocation of the glory days of District Six, the vibrant multi-racial neighbourhood on the slopes of Table Mountain bulldozed to the ground by the racist government during the sixties. Rather, it tackles issues that are firmly contemporary, local and global, drawn from newspapers, television shows and everyday social interaction.

If song and dance are present, it is only insofar as they serve to complement an already high humour quotient, and his characters are hardly cardboard cut-outs, but express a vibrant, albeit warped, inner life.

Critics have chosen to latch upon this factor as the prime reason for Lottering’s burgeoning popularity and continuing box office success. This discursive attempt to confine him to the box of ‘coloured entertainer’ should hopefully be confounded by his masterful portrayal of the white Lorna du Plooy, a new character introduced in his current show. The owner of a pawnshop near the casino, she asserts that she is definitely not a racist.

Like the late Marike de Klerk (the last white president FW De Klerk’s former wife), she believes that coloureds cannot be trusted and is planning to emigrate to Australia, a country where the blacks stay in the bush and only emerge to win Olympic medals.

Lottering’s previous show, From the Cape Flats with Love, was held together by a James Bond theme and a silver handheld hairdryer, a grooming tool which has a special resonance in a country where hair texture was once used by the state to legislate individuals into various race categories.

In Big Stakes and Slap Chips, the unifying theme is Cape Town’s new and very popular Grand West Casino. Lottering’s approach to the subject of casinos and the activity that takes place in them is, however, as far from the Sunday pulpit as it is possible to get.

As always, his scripting has attempted to give full validation to the emotional responses and individual worldviews of the characters he has created, to hilarious effect.

The simple set consists of giant playing cards surrounding a large die that is folded and unfolded into different shapes for each character.

With a script that is tighter than ever, Lottering places his people in various moments around the den of iniquity and chance. Colleen has applied for a job at the casino and relates how she impressed the man hiring new staff. Auntie Merle is sitting in church after the good Lord allowed her to win R10000 (891 U.S. dollars) on the slot machines, Galatia Geduld has just spent a night in the casino hotel with her white boyfriend who happens to be married.

Resourceful as ever, she has taken photographs of herself at every moment during the experience. She also has photos of the bathroom taps, the bar fridge, the peri-peri chip-roll she ordered from room service, and herself hitching home the following day.

Taxi-guard Smiley has been caught by the security guards after harassing people on the casino floor and Travis is coming to pick up a new girlfriend wooed by his borrowed wheelchair.

Lottering’s mastery of phraseology, facial expression and body language to transform himself so totally into his characters have always made it impossible to discern Lottering the stand-up comedian par excellence.

A greater self-assurance in both writing and performance means that the characters are not only more sharply delineated than ever before, but that Lottering has been unafraid to take them into darker social territory. Smiley’s vulgar charm, for example, has been tempered by the disturbing menace of a genuine gangland upbringing, and Auntie Merle is far more hypocritical than even the worst middle-class coloured snob.

The entire 90-minute experience is akin to being privy to the ongoing national conversation, and one which turns out to be gut- wrenchingly funny, deeply thought provoking and revelatory.

The source of Lottering’s new fearlessness may well be his continuing association with David Kramer, director of Kat and the Kings, the award-winning West End show, as well as the experience of performing at the Celebrate South Africa festival in central London last year.

If this is the case, a soon-to-be-finalised tour to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Britain will only serve to enhance his already gigantic onstage presence.

On the down side, the biggest shortcoming of the Lottering brand is its failure to fully exploit the audio-visual medium. With national and international demand for its products at fever pitch, this is something of a shame.

If this situation is corrected in the near future, this one-man Cape Town juggernaut would most definitely circumnavigate the globe.

Lottering has acquired a universality that transgresses all borders, whether these be geographical, social or cultural.