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This is world-class theatre by world-class actors. Thulani Mtsweni and Hamilton Dhlamini, two consummate professionals, were scintillating.
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Woza Albert!
Written by: Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon
Company: Ndlondlo Productions
Director: Hamilton Dhlamini
Actors: Thulani Mtsweni and Hamilton Dhlamini
Stage Manager: Phumeza Damane
Only obtuse white people would suggest that South Africa today is worse off than before 1990, but nobody can deny that our once proud ANC has turned into a self-enriching cabal that does nothing to uplift the country for the sake of the poor.
Today I can write a sentence like this without wondering when the little yellow Corolla of the security police will appear in our street, but it saddens me that the utterly brilliant Woza Albert! still feels relevant. One is supposed to see plays like Woza Albert! the way one does with Shakespeare, simply because they are brilliant. The scenes in this play ought not to be familiar anymore.
Present passbook!
True, the passbooks are gone, but the economic oppression of the poor is as pronounced today as it was when this play debuted. Scenes of desperate black workers running after white men in bakkies begging for piece jobs have not disappeared.
Desperate for jobs
It is no spoiler to say that the oppressed in Woza Albert! beg Morena, Jesus, to come to South Africa.
The people needed liberation, and they begged Morena to provide miracles. The people needed jobs, the people needed economic freedom. A little girl dreamt of receiving a lollipop to suck.
Has any of this changed?
One should not wallow in the negative answers, though.
Thulani Mtsweni and Hamilton Dhlamini
This is world-class theatre by world-class actors. Thulani Mtsweni and Hamilton Dhlamini, two consummate professionals, were scintillating.
I saw the show on a cold morning in Mkhanda. By the time we had reached the one-hour mark, the steam was rising off their bodies.
It struck me that Mtsweni is a year older than I am, while Dhlamini is just less than a year younger. I am quite fit, but I would have had to dig deep to keep up with these two.
They were brilliant. Dhlamini and Mtsweni deserve full houses for their performance.
Do go and see Woza Albert!
Something about the play
Woza Albert! was written by Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon. It was first performed in 1981 on the Market Theatre’s stage with Mtwa and Ngema as the actors.
They toured to Europe and performed the show to critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Festival, before the play took London by storm. It was so successful that the BBC filmed it twice.
The production then played in Berlin, San Francisco and Philadelphia.
The text was first published in 1983 and it has been reprinted many times.
In the copy I own, there are production photographs taken by David Liddle in the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and by Chris Harris at the Riverside Studio in London.
TV broadcast then and now
While writing this review I marvel at how much my pictures of the play resemble those taken of the original actors about forty years ago. (For the record, I had permission to take photographs during the play.)
The story about the origins of the play, printed in the front of the text I own, suggests that Mtwa and Ngema were touring township halls with a production of Mama and the load, a musical by Gibson Kente. One night on the tour bus an argument broke out about what would happen should Jesus, or Morena, decide to have his Second Coming in South Africa, which in those years was ruled by the white Nationalists.
The last paragraph of the introduction to the play reads:
Most of the South African government’s policies are the result, they say, of Christian Nationalist principles. Woza Albert! is our fantasy of a Second Coming to South Africa by Morena, the Saviour.
This was signed Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, Barney Simon.
Mtwa and Ngema began workshopping this play while touring with Kente’s production. They read Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards a poor theatre. Grotowski argued that the body of the actor, not the decor, the music or the costumes, should create the spectacle. Then followed The empty space by Peter Brook, who famously held the view that an actor walking on to an empty space ought to be enough to make theatre happen.
Mtwa and Ngema began putting together skits and scenes, allowing their bodies and a minimum of props to take the audience on a journey.
On the train
While on the train, the actors acted out the sounds and the movement of the train.
The jazz band, then and now
While playing jazz, the actors became a jazz band.
While cutting hair, the actors created a salon filled with sounds and stories, using nothing but their bodies and a white sheet.
White people!
White people were famously played by the two black actors with “half a squash ball painted pink – a clown’s nose, to be placed over his own nose” (sic, as per the original theatre instructions).
Mtwa and Ngema gave up smoking and drinking, got fit and approached Barney Simon, one of the founders of the Market Theatre. More workshops were held and Woza Albert! was the result.
Close to the original
I loved reading the original theatre instructions, printed in 1983, forty years later, marvelling at how closely Thulani Mtsweni and Hamilton Dhlamini’s stage and actions reflected he original intentions of Mtwa, Ngema and Simon.
Woza Albert! was brought to the National Arts Festival by Ndlondlo Productions. Mtsweni is listed as the director.
Woza Albert!, performed by Dhlamini and Mtsweni should be seen for its theatrical splendour. Please do support them.
Wozani Desmond, Steve, Chris and Nelson!
Most members of the audience were born after 1994. They loved it.
TV Interview
An old man like me absolutely loved to see it again.
Woza Albert! is a political satire, and I could not help thinking that today one should ask Morena also to call back from the dead the likes of Desmond Tutu, Steve Biko, Chris Hani and Nelson Mandela if there were to be a Second Coming. What would they say to the Zuma and Cyril circus in Pretoria?
But then, regardless of one’s political feelings, this is sublime theatre.
Wozani Mzansi! Support this play!
See also:
Pieter Odendaal se Droomwerk bring postkoloniale denke na die hospitaal
The king of broken things by Michael Taylor-Broderick at the National Arts Festival, Makhanda
Jakob by Michael Taylor-Broderick at the National Arts Festival, Makhanda