CHRIS THURMAN: A linguistic masterclass

I first saw Rob Murray in a student production at Rhodes University in the late 1990s. It was Steven Berkoff’s stage adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story, The Fall of the House of Usher — a gothic melodrama. My naive 20-something self, sentimental and idealistic, was both horrified and captivated.

Over the years, I would have the pleasure of watching Murray’s work on numerous occasions in Grahamstown, now Makhanda, at the National Arts Festival. He morphed from actor to director and mentor, from arts administrator to programme curator, recognised internationally but always committed and connected to performing arts communities across SA and especially in the Eastern Cape.

Through the theatre companies A Conspiracy of Clowns, Ubom! and FTH:K (From the Hip: Khulumakahle), he produced a series of astonishing shows that managed to address social issues or satirise politics while foregrounding the intimate, tender and indeed universal stories of individuals — vividly rendered characters whose fates became lightning rods for audience affect.

In Gumbo, Pictures of You, Quack!, Crazy in Love, Wombtide and dozens more plays, Murray collaborated with an array of talented artists (including Tanya Surtees, Jayne Batzofin and Liezl de Kock) to create magical, haunting theatrical experiences that stirred the imagination and the soul. They broke and healed hearts, show after show.

Murray’s expertise in masks, puppetry, clowning and mime led to an emphasis on physical performance. FTH:K pioneered the integration of deaf and hearing ensemble members under the credo, “Listen with your eyes!” From the outset, the company’s repertoire and methods made it uniquely placed to cut across linguistic and cultural divisions.

The clown, Murray knew, is a tragicomic figure — evoking laughter and pity, turning slapstick into pathos. His clowning manifested Virgil’s poetic dictum: sunt lacrimae rerum, “there are tears in things”.

Last week, the SA arts sector mourned Murray’s death at the age of 52.

Though Murray had moved away from the verbal towards the visual in his theatre practice, I felt his approving presence as if he was sitting on the empty seat next to me while I listened in awe to the linguistic masterclass of Speelgoed van Glas, Nico Scheepers’ Afrikaans translation and adaptation of the iconic Tennessee Williams play The Glass Menagerie (at the Baxter Theatre until August 16).   

Williams’ four-hander, largely based on his own unhappy family life, tells the story of the Wingfield family from the perspective of son and brother Tom, played expertly in this production by Ben Albertyn.

Introducing his twin role as narrator and character, Tom compares himself to a magician, with “tricks in my pocket and things up my sleeve”. But, whereas the magician gives audiences “an illusion that has the appearance of truth”, Tom delivers the playwright’s reassurance: “I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”

This meta-theatrical element makes us keenly aware of how the spectacle onstage is being presented. Instead of being alienated from the characters’ experience, however, we are drawn into compassion for their suffering — their frustrated desires, their regrets, their yearning.  

Tom’s mother, Amanda (the incomparable Anna-Mart van der Merwe), dwells on her past suitors and on the husband who abandoned her, obsessing about finding a husband for her disabled daughter Laura (deftly portrayed by Carla Smith). Laura, for her part, sees a glimmer of hope in a brief encounter with an enigmatic visitor, Jim O’Connor (the equally enigmatic Mark Elderkin), only to have this crushed like the candle flames Tom bids her to extinguish.

Williams’ play draws heavily on its setting — the US midwest in the 1930s — even as it soars beyond this time and place. Likewise, Scheepers’ inspired choice to transpose the action to the dingy apartment of a working-class white family in 1990s’ SA lends the Afrikaans Wingfields a textured historicity.

The set, props and costumes, along with music and TV references that are neatly interwoven with the dialogue, immerse us in a very specific world. Yet the characters, calling to us from this recognisable, partly forgotten milieu, are given a sense of immediacy by Scheepers’ sparkling writing and a simply brilliant cast.

I left the theatre devastated, touched by sorrow, by the tears in things; simultaneously, I was elevated by this truth-telling illusion.