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Defending the indefensible
Such is the Market Theatre’s international reputation that when overseas visitors to Johannesburg want to sample local dramatic “kultcha”, they typically head to Newtown. American, British and German accents are often to be heard in the auditorium while the house lights are on. With the curious arrogance I share with many of my compatriots, I find this amusing when the production promises to be one laden with sociopolitical references and linguistic quirks specific to SA. Will they get it? Surely not. As the lights went down and the foreign voices grew silent at the start of Somewhere on the Border, I assumed there’d be lots of confused faces and questions later: questions I could help to answer, drawing not on any special theatre knowledge but on the simple fact of being South African. This production is a re-staging of a play written in exile by Anthony Akerman, banned by the censors in 1983 but performed to acclaim three years later. Then, Somewhere on the Border directly addressed the anxieties of predominantly white audiences about compulsory military service, the “bush wars” in Angola and elsewhere, and the ugly end-game of apartheid in civilian society. In 2011 Andre Odendaal revived the play at the National Arts Festival. Based on its success, producer Kosie Smit has secured consecutive runs in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Somewhere on the Border is the story of five conscripts. Though all white, they are temperamentally, ethically and ethnically different, and divided by language, religion and attitudes towards apartheid. However, as they are broken in by their sadistic bombardier (Charlie Bouguenon), they develop a fraternal bond: one tested and ultimately ruptured when they are sent to fight in Angola. In one sense, the play falls into a dramatic genre familiar to anyone who has watched Vietnam war films such as Platoon or, to draw on an SA stage example, Greig Coetzee’s White Men with Weapons. We suppress a squeamish delight at the creative vulgarity of the bombardier. The range of insults is remarkable, and there is a perverse poetry in the crude verbal onslaught of the barrack room and parade ground. We soften towards unpleasant characters and discover that sympathetic ones are tainted. We see them as equal victims of war and the society that spawned it. Yet the play is entrenched in a particular time and place, in its discourse and diction, and, relentlessly, in the nuances of racial dynamics in Southern Africa in the 1980s. But lest this production should become a narcissistic exploration of the multiple pathologies of whiteness, Ndino Ndilula appears sporadically onstage to embody the “blackness” the young troopies are trained to fear. In different guises, he mocks them, cowers before them, threatens them and ultimately forces them to confront their complicity in the military machine. Akerman’s play also turns the mirror towards the audience. I was forced to acknowledge that I had no better idea of what it was like “on the border” than anyone else in the auditorium. I am part of that lucky thirty-something generation of white men: old enough to say I grew up under apartheid but young enough to say I wasn’t conscripted (and therefore able to distance myself from all that the defence force represented). But we’re all complicit, white and black, in one way or another. Not guilty, necessarily, perhaps not even responsible, but ineluctably bound to apartheid and its consequences. Somewhere on the Border is as fresh today as 26 years ago. Chris Thurman Where: Job Market Thea February 12, Baxter in Ca from Februa to March 17 urg’s tre until then the pe Town ry 22 FINANCIAL MAIL FEBRUARY 3, 2012 75
