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South Africa: Theatre
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
COLUMN
26 March 2008
Posted to the web 26 March 2008
Mary Jordan
Johannesburg
IN THIS time of dire education, society can learn much about decency and responsibility, history and contemporary unrest, laughing and loving, from actors telling their stories.
Live performance can be the most transformative, enjoyable experience: scary, mesmerising, complicated. Yet actors tend to claim that the hardest thing about their profession lies not in demonstrating that their talents and artistry remain relevant and needed, but in facing up to the possibility of rejection.
Just so that our star performers realise how much they are appreciated and that their work is worthy of recognition, Dawn Lindberg created the Naledi Awards. This was an exciting example of joined-up thinking, a hugely ambitious enterprise, which defines and documents a year at a time in our local theatrical life.
When she set out five years ago with her panel of judges to recognise, in outstanding performances, the cutting edge of change, while remaining guardians of tradition, little did Lindberg realise what a savage exercise she had set herself and how exhilarating the journey would be. Over the past 12 months, she and her team have assessed more than 60 professional productions: international hits such as The Lion King, produced by Pieter Toerien and Lebo M with a local cast, nostalgic musicals such as Fiddler on the Roof, and a splendid selection of brand new South African plays.
Now Lindberg has always been selfassertive, energetic and enterprising. She just will not change course and she is not a quitter. She persists in the courage of her convictions, camouflaging a rare and precious vulnerability to which she will not admit and does her best to hide.
The announcement of the Naledi Award winners brings together those actors, directors, musical choreographers, lighting and sound experts whose job is the ultimate impossibility: that of fully knowing, and then interpreting the experiences of another human being. These are people who have learned to observe, who try to understand exactly what is happening in other lives and know how to build tension with merciless economy.
Performing centre stage while appearing totally relaxed is the secret of champions. The quartet of actors named as winners for 2007 is quite marvellous. They make scripts sound new-minted and create evenings in the theatre of unforgettable intensity and effortless concentration. Best of all, each seems to understand so deeply what he or she is doing and yet be quite without artifice.
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Headline-hailed are Sean Taylor, Dorothy Ann Gould, Harry Sideropoulos and Kate Normington, each soaring technically in the interpretive nuances of their dramatic roles, pushing the boundaries as to how their subject matter is interpreted, authoritative in their accuracy.
Exploring the fertile areas of a brutal male-female relationship in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Taylor fought a slow battle of attrition against the massed pressures of a scheming wife and the expectations of his university faculty. Gould is always best when interpreting the apparently baffling, the fascinating and the mysterious, and was absorbing to watch in Molora. Sideropoulos conjured up the complex byways in the dreaming mind of the overweight woman in Hairspray; and Normington analysed ambition in a portrait of naked hostility in the same musical.
Is all this a meaningless contest? Do nominees, with their well-documented disdain for critics and criticism, view disappointment with equanimity? Do they honestly look back on a stage career, counting and polishing their trophies? The answers do not really matter. The actors are a part of something bigger than they are themselves. The subtle, intelligent stories of human fallibility in which they appear promote -- as Ezra Pound put it -- "not life for art's sake, but art for life's sake". With the Naledi Awards, in all their varied categories, Lindberg gives us a remarkably representative overview of the state of South African theatre. For that, we are in her debt.
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