| Janet van Eeden in conversation with Kobus Moolman on the release of his collection of radio plays, Blind Voices |
Janet van Eeden, Kobus Moolman
Some of us remember growing up with the radio creating a subliminal sound track to our young lives. Running in from playing outside to catch Noddy at a quarter to four every week day; listening to the usual suspects while warm in bed in the evenings: Squad Cars, Taxi and The Men from the Ministry. Sundays were days of worship: The Goon Show was almost a religion in our family, thanks to my father, who was a complete devotee. And in the background there was always my grandmother, Nana, having her afternoon "nap" with a box of chocolates and with the radio, glued to her ear, playing her Afrikaans "stories". I’m grateful that my early childhood wasn’t dominated by television. Radio was so much more enriching.
Fortunately radio plays and radio dramas are making a bit of a comeback in this country. Kobus Moolman has fortuitously chosen this time to publish a collection of three radio plays, which includes a CD of the BBC production of Soldier Boy, a finalist in the BBC African Performance Radio Drama in the 2003 competition. This play was broadcast by BBC World Service as part of its African Performance season and by the SABC in 2007.
Moolman, an award-winning playwright and poet, has published the collection through Botsotso Publishing, and the collection is a delight for those who enjoy the evocative world of the theatre of the mind.
Soldier Boy deals with the experiences of a young man coming back from the border and confronting his family, who haven’t changed at all since he left. He, on the other hand, is a completely different person, having been traumatised through his experiences in the war.
Miss Dolly is the story about a woman who lives on the detritus of other people’s lives. She is effectively a bag lady who happens to have inherited a house from her late railway worker father. When her house is broken into by two escaping convicts she experiences, surprisingly enough, compassion for the first time in her life. She is not the one being compassionate, though, and the lack of sincere love in her past makes it difficult for her to deal with it in the present. Miss Dolly won a merit award in the 1995 BBC World Playwriting Competition and was produced for radio by SABC in 1997 and rebroadcast in 2006.
The third play in the series is a short and more obscure piece, Womb Tide. It was written to be performed “in the dark” and Moolman says it simulates three voices speaking in the womb. It helps to bear this in mind when one reads this play. The three child-like voices vacillate between singing nursery rhymes and speaking about their impending loss of innocence as they "see into the future", as it were. The real world’s corruption impinges on their inter-uterine consciousnesses.
I asked Moolman to explain whether writing for radio gave one greater freedom or whether it in fact places greater restrictions on a writer. He answered with his usual thoughtfulness: “Practically, it’s easier for a writer to write for radio, as you don’t have to worry about the costs and difficulties of production as you would if it were a stage play,” Moolman said. “I love writing for radio as I can concentrate on writing pure language. The language is purer in some ways, ironically enough, as all the unseen action has to be created using only words. One is limited in terms of using physical action, yes, because one is restricted to using dialogue only. But I enjoyed this restriction, perhaps because of my interest in poetry. The attention of the writer is focussed only on words and not on action. That is a source of pleasure for me in writing for radio.”
Soldier Boy has very specific music cues, and I wondered how often a writer of a radio play would "hear" the soundtrack to the piece he or she was writing. “Soldier Boy was an unusual case,” Moolman answered. “I chose very specific music to be played throughout for two reasons. Firstly, the inspiration for the play came from a friend of mine who had been in the army. He’d been involved in terrible experiences with landmines on the border in Angola. He told me how he’d come back home from the army one day and as he approached his house, he stood outside for a moment. He could hear his sister playing Fleetwood Mac inside. He said looking at the house from the outside and hearing the music made him feel that his home was a reality he’d lost touch with. He was reduced to tears. His story sparked off this Soldier Boy, and the play opens with Ouboet, an eighteen-year-old young man, coming back from the border standing outside his childhood home and hearing his brother playing Fleetwood Mac on the radio. It makes him even more aware of how removed he is from his former home and how his childhood has been lost to him forever.”
The play is very moving, especially to those of us who lost loved ones during the border war. Moolman captures the young soldier’s inability to convey his traumatic experiences and his complete transformation by these experiences to his closest family. I was deeply touched by this aspect of the play as it resonates all too painfully for me. The experiences of both my brothers in the army, especially those of my brother who had a breakdown and who subsequently died on the border, were brought back with all too painful freshness. Moolman’s choice of music – Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix amongst others – strongly recreates that era, as do the "radio inserts" from Forces Favourites, another background soundtrack to that strange time.
Another interesting feature of the play is that Moolman has consciously given Ouboet’s brother a disability. Moolman does not often focus on this very real aspect of his own life. Boetie is unable to walk well, as he was born with disabled legs. This disability keeps Boetie at home, where he refuses to give up on his adherence to the teachings of his racist father: the terrorists are the wicked enemy and must die, and fighting for the country is good. Boetie is unable to comprehend what has happened to Ouboet as his reality doesn’t allow for shades of grey.
“It’s the fist time I’ve written about and grappled with a character who is disabled,” Moolman explains. “But I wanted a reason why Boetie couldn’t go to the border. His inability to be conscripted causes a rivalry between the previously very close brothers and corrupts their relationship.”
The BBC production has Greig Coetzee playing the part of Ouboet, with Clinton Marais as Boetie. Frank Graham gives a sterling performance as Pa, and Bheki Mkhwane plays Outa.
Moolman talks about the recording of the play, which has a very authentic feel to it. “Catherine Fellows, the producer from the BBC, and Neva Misserien, the technical director, came to South Africa to record the play,” he says. “We did most of the play in Greig’s parents’ Bed and Breakfast in Drummond! And when we needed to do road scenes, we did the scenes on the road outside. There were only a few sections that were recorded in a proper recording studio. These were the sections with internal dialogue where it was essential that we have a quiet background.”
Moolman tells me that Miss Dolly was inspired by a white woman who wandered the streets of Pietermaritzburg about ten years ago. “She would have a supermarket trolley with her wherever she went and she would pick up the bits of cardboard and rubbish she found lying around the street,” he says. “Everyone used to have their theories about her. People would say she was secretly a millionaire and so on. She inspired Miss Dolly. I created a character around a woman whose life was similar to hers. Miss Dolly lives in a little house which her father left to her when he died. One day two convicts break into her house and a relationship of sorts develops between her and one of the convicts. It’s a love story of sorts.”
I ask Moolman how he knows whether a play or a character "has legs", as they say in the industry. When does he know that an inspiration for a character or a story has enough of a created reality to take him and an audience satisfactorily through the full creative process of a good play?
“For me it’s all about character,” Moolman answers. “When I can actually hear the characters speaking to me, then I know I have something to say. I don’t start with a story. My plays always start with a character. More often than not it’s with the character speaking. I will hear a voice. With Full Circle [Moolman’s award-winning stage play] I literally heard this young girl saying, ‘I can see! In the darkness I can see.’ Those opening words have never changed in all the drafts of the play I’ve written. I then start to ask questions of that character: Why can she see in the darkness? What can she see? But for me my plays always start with character.”
The collection sells for R120 and copies are available directly from Kobus Moolman on either Moolman@ukzn.ac.za or kobusman@telkomsa.net.
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