The alchemy of a laugh — conceiving ‘The Ugly Noo Noo’

In sharing the method of his iconic and critically acclaimed one-man show The Ugly Noo Noo, theatre maker and performer Andrew Buckland dissected the alchemical process of a laugh in a revelatory way that seemed to slow down time.

“The moment of laughter is not a voluntary thing. Before you have had any control, your diaphragm has reacted. The laughter comes before you have thought about it. At that moment there’s an openness and a possibility of you seeing something you would normally be repulsed by, and seeing it in a different light,” he said.

This was at a gathering of The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s How | Showing The Making, which invites creatives to share strategies and approaches to their influential work. For Buckland it was a chance to reflect on the work that set him off onto a particular way of making theatre — to use laughter as a way to draw people to see things from different perspectives and to see themselves, to discuss the contexts that shaped the work and the distinct style of performance (blending mime, text and strong sociopolitical commentary) that he established with it.

The Ugly Noo Noo is 36 years old, having been performed for the first time at the Market Theatre in 1988. A political allegory like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, it works comically with the irrational fear of the Parktown Prawn (cockroaches that plagued the suburb during the 1980s and 1990s) to examine the relationship between fear and power and how it manifests personally and politically through the systems of colonialism, fascism and apartheid, the violent legacies of which continue to unfold.

It gave Buckland a voice to address his own angst, fear, shame and guilt. Aware of different artistic expressions of protest from Mbongeni Ngema’s Asinamali and Woza Albert (written with Percy Mtwa and Barney Simon) to Athol Fugard, Winston Ntshona and John Kani’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island, The Ugly Noo Noo became Buckland’s authentic response to the violent state of South Africa in the 1980s.

Wake up

“In 1988 the question for me was: how do I live my life? I was a white man living in a predominantly white, middle-class suburb with my little family in the middle of apartheid South Africa in a state of emergency that was about to implode. I was concerned with the questions: how can I live, how do I deal with the anxiety and with the conflict inside me, and how do I transform?” Buckland said.

“Most of the people coming to the theatre were white, middle-class. This was to say to them, ‘Wake up. Things have to change and you need to play your part.’ This became a mechanism for that, especially because it translated the fear that became violent into laughter.”

What seemed important in the creation of work and something Buckland gathered from his mime training is that at the core of performance, the action exclusively takes place in the audience’s imagination.

“I love that as an idea. In the creation of The Ugly Noo Noo, I was keen to put the audience in the question mode. In mime, there’s the delicate line to get the audience curious.”

Another step was transformation — employing different and conflicting characters to take the narrative forward. The idea of the body as a communicator and the power of physical embodiment to engage an audience viscerally were made clear during Buckland’s tertiary training.

Classical mime training taught him about the economy and precision of movement. Later he learnt to combine that with the precision of voice and constant practice.

The immediate work after The Ugly Noo Noo was a reaction to Buckland’s realisation that it relied a lot on an English-speaking audience. Though there was a lot of physicality, he became aware of his monolingualism.

Breaking down language

“How do I relate to language? I started to look at the relationship between sound and gesture,” he said. “The reaction to Ugly Noo Noo was to break down the relationship with language and to put them in opposition. The impulse to contrast language and gesture to invite people in.”

The works that followed included Feedback (looking at the politics of food) and Bloodstream (looking at the politics of governance and democracy), among other productions.

In choosing to do Ugly Noo Noo now, there were suggestions about changing it or updating it. For one, there are no longer many Parktown Prawns, but Buckland was confident in the work as it is.

“The reason I had come to it is I had been trying to write a book to document my process and reflections, and to do an annotative version of the text. The more I read it, it was still funny and made more specifically for the South African context of that time. The more I spoke the lines now, the more it — sadly and in so many ways — is exactly the same. It speaks to the fascism around the world and the idiots we thought were exclusively South African.

“Rather than trying to make it more current, I felt confident the work — taken as it is — will have the same impact, internationally and domestically. The way we deal with cockroaches, the way people are deemed inhuman, happens every day.”

The Ugly Noo Noo is on at the Market Theatre until September 1.

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