NAME: FIDEL F. NAMISINUMBER: 0409466M

COURSE CODE: DRAA213DRAMA & FILM: SOUTH AFRICAN THEATRE

LECTURER: GREG HOMANN

Question:

International theatre practitioners such as Jerzy Grotowski, Bertolt Brecht and

Augusto Boal have been the source of much inspiration for South African theatre

groups such as The Serpent Players, The Junction Avenue Theatre Company,

Workshop ’71 and The Company at the Market Theatre.

Through a detailed analysis of any ONE play dealt with in the course, and a thorough

interrogation of the key principles of the relevant international practitioner(s):

— Discuss how these methodologies have guided the collaborative

process of the play makers.

— Then expand on this to demonstrate the ways in which thematically

and structurally the selected text confronts the realities of South

African society.

Due Date: September 14th.

When Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema approached Barney Simon to collaborate

with them on the creation of a play, they probably had no idea that Woza Albert!

would become an instant classic of South African theatre. With a script and stage that

demands a powerful performance from the actors, Woza Albert! has had the unique

combination of critical and economic success in the various cities it has toured

throughout the world. Undoubtedly, this is partly due to the fact that the crafting of

the play was extensively influenced by the leading theorists and practitioners of

contemporary theatre, principally Jerzy Grotowski, Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal.

This essay will give a detailed analysis of the play, paying specific attention to the

way in which the key principles of the aforementioned international theatre

practitioners influenced the playmaking process of Woza Albert! In addition, it will

look at how Woza Albert! confronts the realities of South African society, both now

and at the time in which it was written.

Percy Mtwa and Mbongeni Ngema began working on Woza Albert! in 1981 when

they met on the set of the play Mama and the Load, a musical by Gibson Kente.

(Mtwa, 1995: 1). During the township tour of the play, Ngema had been contracted to

work as an actor while Mtwa was a singer and dancer. They found that tey shared a

common desire to create more challenging and powerful plays, palys that would

confront the reality of the South Africa that they were living in, and therefore decided

to study the playmaking process more diligently and academically. Their studies led

them to the discovery of ‘Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre and Peter Brook’s

The Empty Space. They stopped drinking and smoking and exercised theur bodies,

their voices and their resonators.” Although they had decided that they wanted to

create a piece together, they were yet to diceover what their subject matter would be.

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They stumbled upon it quite serendipitously. “One night in their touring bus…there

was a heated argument on the Second Coming. What would happen to Jesus if he

came back –to South Africa!” (Mtwa, 1995: 1).

The very premise of the play, we therefore see, is deeply rooted in its social context.

1981 was a period of extreme unrest in South Africa. Five years earlier, in 1976,

students in Soweto staged an uprising that could only be quelled by the use of military

force. A state of emergency was declared, which continued well into the mid-eighties.

Ngema and Mtwa found themselves surrounded by a volatile situation of extreme

tension. Political activists were being banned, arrested, or even worse, murdered. The

government was using strong-arm tactics to keep itself in power. Thus Ngema and

Mtwa undoubtedly felt that a good outlet for their thoughts, which were probably

representative of the sentiments of the majority of the black population, was to direct

a stinging tirade of satire at the oppressors. And what better premise for such satire

than the interesting, and indubitably humorous argument that they stumbled upon in

their touring bus about the things that Jesus would be subjected to if he decided that

1981 South Africa was a good time and place to stage his Second Coming?

However, Ngema and Mtwa were not fools. In 1981, all theatres in South Africa

could be multi-racial upon application for a permit. These theatres just so happened to

be located in the white cities. The black townships had to make do with halls,

churches, community centres and schools. Mtwa and Ngema realised that a play that

appealed only to black audiences was a play that was limping on one foot in terms of

getting its political message across. They had to cross the colour divide. They

therefore approached Barney Simon for help. He had founded The Company in 1974

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along with Mannie Manim, which had made its home in Johannesburg’s old Market in

1976, where he became of the Artistic Director of the newly founded Market Theatre.

Mtwa and Ngema knew that Simon’s “extensive experience in Black and non-racial

theatre and …the work that he had done in the creation of text with actors” made him

the perfect person to direct their play. (Mtwa, 1995: 1). Simon agreed, and the three

spent six weeks working intensively to create the play that was to be Woza Albert!

As we have already mentioned earlier, Ngema and Mtwa had come across the

writings of Jerzy Grotowski, and these had made such a strong impression on them

that the two changed their lifestyles and started carrying out Grotowski’s exercises

even before they had begun creating their play. They relied on Grotowski’s

methodology of creating texts from the actors, also known as the workshop style of

development, to develop the play. Grotowski strongly felt that the main creative force

in the theatre was the actor –his body, his voice and his thoughts. Therefore the actor

also needed to make exercise this power in the creation of the text. This system of

play development was utilised extensively in Grotowski’s Laboratory, which was his

own theatre company. (Grotowski, 1968: 51).

The collaborative creation of the piece also involved the reading of the Gospels and

scouring the streets of Soweto and Johannesburg (Mtwa, 1995: 1). This was because

the premise of the play required material that would be generated by the catalytic

clash between a biblical figure and contemporary city life. Although this may have

been a coincidence, this aspect of the play’s production closely parallels Bertolt

Brecht’s methodologies. Brecht laid a lot of emphasis in the contemporary political

world, and he often turned to history and fable in order to achieve an insightful

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juxtaposition. Such juxtaposition often resulted in the creation of a particular crisis on

which the play would be based (Williams, 1976:324). He often used this to enhance

the alienation or distancing effect that he was always seeking to achieve. This entailed

making the audience keenly aware of the fact that what they were watching was

merely a play, and as such they should think less of the play itself and more of its

underlying message (Willet, 1999: 58).

We see this methodology clearly at play in Woza Albert! Jesus, who is a historical

figure, is placed within the contemporary context and the resulting crisis provides the

premise of the play.

The influence of Brecht and Grotowski was much more far reaching than that,

however. The essence of Grotowski’s poor theatre, if such a description could be

hazarded, could be summarised as the deepening and strengthening of the connection

between the actor and the audience, which are the only two vital elements needed for

theatre to exist (Grotowski, 1968: 17). As such, everything that is not strictly essential

to the performance must be stripped away, both in the actor and in the set, as a sort of

purifying of theatre.

The first consequence of such a methodology is that the play becomes less about the

plot and more about the characters, as is seen in Woza Albert! The plot consists of a

series of apparent encounters between Morena and various urban dwellers, ranging

from a coal seller to the Prime Minister. Nothing really happens in the play, and after

several such encounters the main characters ask Morena to resurrect their heroes of

the freedom struggle. The real message of the play comes across in the various

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reactions that the characters have to the prospect of meeting Morena. It reveals the

satirical nature of the play, and serves to put some distance between the audience and

the play itself, encouraging them not to think about the events in the play but rather

about the underlying message of the play. Again, we see the influence of Bertolt

Brecht guiding the collaborative process of the playmakers. According to Brecht, a

play should not cause the spectator to emotionally identify with the action they are

presented with. Rather, the play should provoke rational self-reflection and a critical

view of the actions on stage (Willet, 1999: 32).

Another Grotowskian element of production is the minimal use of props. In the

written text of the play, the set is described as consisting “of two up-ended tea-chests

side by side about centre stage. Further upstage an old wooden plank, about ten feet

long, is suspended horizontally on old ropes. From nails in the plank hang the ragged

clothes that the actors will use for their transformations.” That is all there is on stage

in terms of props. All the other props are imaginary, and the actors create them by

miming their use. This is seen in the scene where the two actors pretend to pull a truck

forward (Mtwa, 1995: 45).

The lighting of Woza Albert! is also very simple. This is in keeping with the

methodologies of Grotowski, who liked to keep the lighting of his sets simple so as to

lay more emphasis on the encounter between the actor and the spectator. The sound

effects are actually produced by the actors themselves. They simulate the sounds of

sirens, houseflies and electric hair clippers. The resultant effect is that the audience is

no way distracted from the actual performance of the actors by the trappings of sound,

light or scenery (Grotowski, 1968: 32).

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The methodologies of Bertolt Brecht also influenced the collaborative process of the

playmakers. Brecht believed that theatre should focus on political issues, especially in

its themes and plots (Willet, 1999: 18). Plays should provoke the audience to think

critically about the political, social and economic situation that provides the context

for the play. As such, the audience should not be too engrossed in the plot or the

characters of the play itself, but rather in its underlying socio-political themes and

messages. In order to do this, Brecht devised a number of techniques to foster this

‘alienation effect’ as he liked to call it (Willet, 1999: 19). These devices were used

extensively in the crafting of Woza Albert!

For instance, the use of song has the effect of reminding the audience that all they are

seeing is a performance. Woza Albert! uses many songs and even dance, which add to

the element of spectacle but without really engrossing the audience. The songs,

however, do have a strong underlying political message. For instance, one song,

entitled Woza Kanye Kanye, calls the audience to come together because “whites are

swines (sic) and they call [black people] damns (sic)” (Mtwa, 1995: 43). The song at

the end of the play is about the Lord resurrecting the black heroes of the struggle. The

political message in it is that the audience should celebrate the lives of these heroes

and not let their deaths have been in vain.

The actors also play multiple characters, which was a devise that Brecht used to create

a distance between the audience and the text (Willet, 1999: 35). In Woza Albert! the

actors play the roles of prisoners, prison wardens, journalists, politicians, barbers,

township women and army officers. The actors, however, do not try to give the

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impression that they truly believe themselves to be this wide array of characters nor

do they expect the audience to believe so either. Rather than mimicking real people,

the actors portray these roles as representative of the different groups of people in

South African society (Willet, 1999: 37).

Direct address was yet another technique that Brecht used to achieve the goal he had

in mind for his theatrical performances (Willet, 1999: 24). This technique is also

utilised extensively in Woza Albert! It does not, however, have the effect of

distancing the audience, because the audience eventually gets used to it and sees it as

yet another comical effect in the play. One such instance occurs when one of the

characters turns to the audience and says that black people really know how to lie.

The resultant effect is quite comical, and results in the audience being more riveted

than it was before (Mtwa, 1995: 3).

Comparing it to the classical constructs of the theatrical discourse as compiled by

Aristotle, it must be said that Woza Albert! departs radically from the classical Greek

form of theatre.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grotowski, J. 1968. Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Willet, J. (ed.) 1999. Brecht on Theatre. New York: Hill and Wang.

Williams, R. (ed.) 1976. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. Great Britain: Penguin.

Mtwa, P., Ngema, M. & Simon B. 1995. Woza Albert! London: Methuen Drama.

Boal, A. 1979. Theater of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press.

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