Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf

Sometime last week I overheard an impassioned plea from that fellow Swerdlow, who broadcasts theatre and movie critiques on the radio. I hadn’t listened to the context; all I got was a plea to “save theatre in Johannesburg”. Go and see some live theatre over the next two weeks, he said, if you want to save live theatre in Johannesburg, or something to that effect. I was moved.

I was once a fanatical fan of the theatre. I even had a part-ownership of an immensely, internationally successful theatre company: The Sundown Theatre Company, for a number of years. I’ve played Mark Anthony, Frederick Nietzsche and Arthur Bell, the Whiskey man, the latter in live impro’ theatre. I even won a few bits and pieces of illusory instants and some gratuitously favourable reviews from respected critics. My company produced the first ever multiracial production of Othello on the Continent, and I directed a production of Soyinka’s work, “Kongi’s Harvest” that spawned an entire community theatre movement. Eventually my partner went to Australia and I came here and discovered that there was barely any theatre at all in Jozi, that amounted to much. I pottered a bit.

I took a show to Grahamstown in ’87, it played to full houses and toured around the local neighbourhood for a year. It was a one man, double bill, called SollyK. In other words I played both parts, one under my own name and one, under the name AN Akter. My favourite review for that show was from the fellow who said “a tour de force… I was half way through the second piece before I realised that AN Akter was the same person who played in the first piece.” I had achieved my goal: the total immersion of self into the character to the extent that the hidden "me" was almost obliterated; and it had been recognised.

So I retired. Always quit when you are ahead. The audiences for real theatre had almost finally died. When they all go to Grahamstown it looks like a lot; but there are amasses of isolates; lonely people out there starving in the suburbs. The inevitable effect of the playwright’s international boycott was to kill the Theatre, which was what it was supposed to do. There was nothing left by the end of the eighties but one-dimensional “tits n bums” stuff… congenial formulaic pap to distract, maybe even misdirect, the masses… and of course the all-consuming “Protest theatre” with its strident one dimensional polemic; still wailing. I trained as an economist, Indifference curves are a part of my bloodstream.

I had no intention of ending up like the late Bill Whatsisname, who dropped dead the other day at a young age: an artistic genius, crushed by the overwhelming amount of crap he had to perform to earn a random buck. I’d sucked the best from the marrow.

So I moved on to more interesting, more substantial avenues. [I am though being currently tempted with an offer to play Socrates, I suspect the director wants to workshop the thing, although she assures me there is a script with traditional chorus and voices. I am most skeptical about this new collectivist approach to writing that has insidiously become our substitute for creative genius, so I don’t know how I feel about that Socrates thing yet. He is one of the few roles I would come out of retirement to play. And anyway, Socrates, like Nietzsche, would be a private performance for a guest audience… everything by invitation only. There is no mass market for Socrates … for better or worse. However should you come to see Socrates, and I shall give you an invitation, then you won’t see me: for I shall have become Socrates, in the same way that I became Nietzsche, Marc Anthony: “Pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth that I am meek and gentle with these… butchers”, the “fiery Tybalt… and a long line of others.

Anyway…I am obviously becoming old and maudlin… I ramble.]

So, frankly, I was largely unaware that there was any ‘real’ live theatre left in Johannesburg. To me, Theatre is the serious stuff… The “tits n bums” fluffy, musical frolics that pass for theatre in most people’s minds, I think of simply as, live and diversionary, invariably agreeable, entertainment… it is not Theatre. Theatre is frequently disagreeable.

Real theatre is the stuff of the mind: moving awareness through powerful and convincing, realistic ‘Stanislavskian’ performance, sometimes, wierd and random means; on others, and always solid text and a potent sub-text..

Real theatre was never “big” at any time in Jozi’s city history; Stanislavsky is too demanding for a town dedicated to generating quick turnover. Nonetheless it did have a small and passionate following, like most normal major cities, that is until; it was murdered by passionate revolutionaries who, like all autocrats, rushed to close the doors to awareness.

So I was surprised by Swerdlow’s passionate plea, and I thought okay… why not ‘do our bit’? And if we were looking for food for the mind then who better than Albee; and what could be more absorbing than this giant domestic tragedy about a woman’s conflict between her love for her father and obsessive need to impress him, and “Daddy’s Girl’s” intense disappointment with the way her life had evolved; and the traps she had thus created out of her life. She is a character playing, with an acute unawareness, the game of “if it weren’t for you”: one of the most deadly of all our human games.

Thus, primed; a couple of nights ago I went with my own [youngest] daughter and her friends to see “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf” [by Edward Albee] at the Market Theatre, downtown: not my favourite nighttime journey; but I’ll brave it for Albee.

She [my daughter] and her friends found the play absorbing, for some it was their first experience of serious theatre. They were entertained. It was a good, if somewhat dark, comedy they said. For myself I was disappointed. I felt suckered, and they were cheated. I thought we were going to see a professional performance of Albee’s Virginia Woolf, instead we saw a production by Janice Honeyman of another play with the same name and a different theme. I was crudely subjected to something reduced to the trite. In its worst moments [there were some excellent moments] it was as bad as some of the worst ‘amdram’, ‘Art of coarse acting’ thespishness it has been my misfortune to see in years.

I didn’t hear what Swerdlow actually said about this play, if he ever said anything. I walked in on his plea. I do hear him routinely savaging almost every movie that appears on circuit. I would regard any fulsome praise from Swerdlow for this ineffectual interpretation of Virginia Woolf as reflecting poorly on Swerdlow’s reputation. It would reveal him as something of a poseur… knocking all the foreign filmmakers while praising the people who bought him lunch last week. Still I didn’t hear what, or if, he said anything: so perhaps he also said it was a deeply flawed production.

Before I continue I should say that I have over the course of my life seen a number of different performances of this play. More specifically I have seen the definitive Richard Burton/ Elizabeth Taylor version about four times, and at least three amateur or semi- professional productions in different parts of the world plus a stunning interpretation produced by my competition in the Theatre business, way back when. I should also say that had the performance, featuring Sean Taylor in the lead role of George; and Fiona Ramsay playing Martha, been performed by, say, the Roodepoort Amateur Dramatic Society [assuming there is such an organisation] then I would have said “Bravo”: well tried.

But it wasn’t. What we saw was allegedly a professional production for which the actors were presumably paid. Well sorry; I feel I should have my money back. If this mangled interpretation is what we are to expect from a rejuvenating theatre structure then I am not sure I want to support it.

As far as I could work out Virginia Woolf is a failed production derived from a failed vision. It is entertaining and lively, and everybody on stage has a great deal of fun. It is almost ‘Commercial’. It is however directed by a theatrical dilettante with the vision of a pantomime specialist.

When and if, I go to the theatre I want to see theatre: not pantomime… an art form that I despise. The Director Janice Honeyman lacked either the vision or the guts to play this text for real and settled instead for a mincing attempt at high camp comedy, something the text was not designed for. The result was that half the cast [of four] were doing their intense ‘method structured’ thing immersed in the pain of the text and doing it well; and the other half were in some other production that was somewhere between Happy families and The Fairy Queen Panto show. The result was to distort the play and subtract from its power by reducing it to an absurd piece of kitchen sink banality.

For those unfamiliar with Albee’s “Virginia Woolf”: it is a savage, brutal and terrifyingly realistic interpretation of a dysfunctional marriage. We [SA] are a society with one of the world’s highest rates of spousal abuse arguably, so we should know a great deal about dysfunctional, abusive marriages.

What we were presented with was a dysfunctional interpretation of one of the finest examples of modern realism in the theatrical lexicon, a play of immense power in which the title roles are forever mediated by the legendary performances of Burton and Taylor.

As I said, I have seen this play performed at various different venues over the past three decades; and have never seen it as poorly interpreted as it was at the market theatre last night. Frankly I found it testimony to the starvation induced by the long theatre boycott of our country that so many members of the audience actually rose to their feet at the end to applaud the performers, presumably for their endurance in handling the demanding three hour script, perhaps because they were relieved at being able to stand at last, and sadly because, being a young audience they knew no better… It was significant that older members of the audience remained seated.

Why do I believe it was dysfunctional?

First off, the play is a serious piece of realist theatre with a great deal of bitter irony, which is often unexpectedly humorous. When you laugh, you laugh for relief from the unbearable tension induced by Albee’s antagonistic lead players not because we are watching farce.

Ms Honeyman’s interpretation has the title role of George, well played by Sean Taylor who plays for real and is completely believable. In fact he is superb, with some issues related to vocal range being his core blemish. On the other hand he is not the main lead character: Martha is. Martha, played by Fiona Ramsay is a legendary character. Martha is Leona Helmsley on steroids, the “Queen of mean” on a bad rotten day. Martha’s character does not veer between ‘nice guy’ and ‘little miss nasty’. At her best she is mean, vicious and spiteful… and she just gets worse and worse and worse like someone uncontrollably vomiting: one of the play’s potent symbols, until the ultimate dénouement and the unraveling: when she discovers the possibility, an uncertain possibility, of redemption.

Ramsey simply doesn’t cope with this … Or perhaps it is Honeyman who doesn’t cope. Ramsey makes a valiant effort, but she is not living in her part, she slips in and out of character and we are all too aware that she is madly ‘acting’. Maybe she is jumping around doing a dozen other gigs each day and she has difficulty staying focused. She plays the role as “Little miss Nice girl” with a happy breezy smile that pops up irritatingly, often enough to give the lie to the violence we are witnessing. It’s as though she or Honeyman the Director, thinks the play is a drawing room comedy with a bit of ‘nasty’ now and again: “Hello we are going to have fun with the Guests”, and the audience is confused, whether we are in a comedy or a tragedy… not knowing .

Maybe Ramsey is simply miscast. When there is only one actress in town it is hardly possible to play everything just because there is no one else. She demonstrated neither the gravitas nor the vocal range to cope with this most demanding of roles. I regret that, because I had always considered her to be one of the few remaining heavies left in town.

Maybe this interpretation was Honeyman’s genuflection to the tide of “female-as-male-dominated- victim” syndrome that is part of our national conversation. It was an error; on a par with changing the character of Shylock because you didn’t want to offend Jewish sensibilities. The effect was [ironically] to turn Taylor into the Star and simultaneously make him the ‘bad guy’.

Ramsay thus gives a lightweight uncommitted walk-thru performance; littered with coy little ‘smiley faces’ suggesting that this conflict to which we are witness is simply a charade to entertain their guests: thereby completely losing the plot, sub-text and all.

Martha is not a games player, everything she does is for real. At a practical level the character [Martha], as created by Albee, is too inherently unaware of herself to conceive of consciously "games playing": she does it reflexively, like we all do. … Her vicious, mean, devious character is mediated by her obsession with her father and her rage; that her choice of husband has so completely disappointed her father: and therefore terminally humiliated her. Her feelings for her husband are submerged; one could say, “swamped” by her humiliation. She is locked into her patterns of behaviour and can no more see herself as others see her than you or I can see ourselves. This is what makes her an inherently tragic character. Ms Ramsey is simply too ‘nice’. Her character becomes an object of pity not tragedy, and that puts us into a completely different genre.

One notices that Janice Honeyman the director of this performance is simultaneously, or maybe contemporaneously, directing her annual pantomime. One suspects that her lack of commitment to the harsh, demanding interpretive world of method performance is fatally undermined by this amateurish conflict of interest. This conflict is demonstrated most grotesquely in her lackadaisical interpretation of the third character in this four hander: Nick, played by Nicholas Pauling.

Pauling has an evident yearning to play the traditional fairy queen, or similar in one of Honeyman’s pantomimes; maybe it will pay better. He hams his way recklessly through the script with a feckless, camp abandonment, posturing and pouting on a scale that would be better suited to the Barnyard, than to the Market. He was embarrassing.

To compound the directorial error: the forth character in this four part ensemble, “Honey”, played with committed competence by Erica Wessels, has to perform with a script that has been carefully mangled to completely eviscerate her role… For some inexplicable reason Honeyman has chosen to excise two of her scenes from the text. These are two critical ‘explanatory’ scenes. The effect of the excisions is that she is reduced to a one-dimensional cipher, and we, the audience, are left in bemused wonder at her condition. We are therefore unable to deduce that this second, younger couple’s relationship mirrors, faithfully the tracks followed by their seniors.

Inevitably Honeyman’s interpretation plays along one octave, when the text demands the entire keyboard.

I am not going to dwell on the awfulness of the fake American voices adopted by the entire cast. There is nothing in the text to suggest that the events happen in the USA so why these roaming dialects? I don’t understand why South African actors who are juggling half a dozen jobs at a time, attempt to perform in a language they are not competent to explore, nor prepared to devote time to perfecting… we do listen to the real thing every day on TV. This production could and should have been set in Jo'burg. Presumably Honeyman was so intent on how much money she could garner from the Christmas Panto’ that it never occurred to her that a locally set Virginia Woolf could blow the city apart.

I am also puzzled that Honeyman chose to set the refrain “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf” to the seemingly obvious “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf” tune that Albee originally had in mind; when copyright diktats [Disney own the rights to the “Big Bad Wolf” music] have always determined that the refrain is set to “Here we go around the mulberry bush”… Presumably Disney has waived their interest.

So in conclusion; using the Burton/Taylor combo as the definitive, “ten out of ten” version, that mediates all subsequent interpretations of this grim and formidable piece of work, I would award Sean Taylor an 8 for his interpretation, with caveats to his surprisingly limited vocal range, another directorial error, since a man of his obvious commitment, skill and experience would surely have been able to extend it, where it was demanded from the text; had it been called for. Ms Ramsay gets a 2. The character called Nick played by Pauling gets nought, zero, zilch: in a genuine market we would have pelted him with tomatoes. Erica Wessels who plays Honey managed a creditable 7.

Janice Honeyman gets a 1 for effort.

Do I think, having seen this that we should abandon the idea of viewing live shows, and notwithstanding Swerdlow’s emotional plea, let the theatre succumb to its most obvious death throes? No… we must persevere and hope it gets better… it is our human condition. We must nurture the gentle flame.

And in spite of what I have said at the beginning and throughout, I do think you should see this production, if only for the rare experience of Mr. Albee’s brilliant script, and Mr. Taylor’s generally competent, absorbing and enjoyable interpretation of it.

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Other work by NiK can be found at http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari