The French Institute of SA (IFAS) and the Kwasha! Theatre Company have made contributions to the local arts and culture landscape over the past few years. So it is unsurprising that their partnership, backed by institutional weight — IFAS is the cultural agency of the French Embassy, while Kwasha! is a professional launch pad for selected graduates of the Market Theatre Laboratory — has produced notable productions.
A stage adaptation in 2018 of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince was followed in 2019 by a version of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Thus began a trajectory from the expansive imagination of Saint-Exupéry’s enigmatic tale, by turns melancholic and joyful, to the more cynical world created by Ionesco — likewise a combination of the maudlin and the funny, but in this case a play that shifts from realist satire into absurdist nightmare.
If there is dreamy idealism in The Little Prince, which its author sustained in the midst of World War 2 (the book was published in 1943), Rhinoceros recalls Europe’s decline into totalitarianism from the more jaundiced perspective of a later generation. Ionesco had experienced right-wing nationalism and anti-Semitism first hand in Romania before the war and in Vichy France.
This trajectory is continued in Kwasha’s latest collaboration with IFAS as a new ensemble under the direction of Dintshitile Mashile tackles Boris Vian’s The Empire Builders. Like Rhinoceros, this play was written and first performed in 1959, and there are various other similarities. The spectre of Nazism hovers in the air, as does another difficult memory — or reality — for postwar France: the end of empire, and with it a long-deferred reckoning.
Vian’s comical-menacing absurdism is darker, and in his caustic treatment of middle-class mannerisms, prudishness and pettiness there is less room for laughter. This is also a function of the story’s growing claustrophobia; a quintet of characters (a family, their servant and their neighbour) are forced upstairs into smaller and smaller domestic spaces as they try to escape a strange noise.
The violence that simmers under the surface of bourgeois sensibilities is first displaced onto the Shmürz, an amorphous creature who reappears on each floor, before the survivalist instincts of the family patriarch see him abandoning his wife and daughter in an attempt to save himself. He fails to do so, and the unexplained noise — possibly accompanied by a pack of avenging Shmürzes — finishes him off.
The Kwasha! rendition ratchets up the tension of this fatal neurosis by turning The Empire Builders into an audio play. This is, of course, a Covid twist; the strategy has been adopted by many (perpetually “pivoting”) performing artists around the world who have found new formats, or rediscovered old ones, as they have sought alternatives to the audience-auditorium coronavirus conundrum.
The shift to audio is effective because the narrowing world of the characters in The Empire Builders remains contained within, and coterminous with, the space between your ears. It’s a scary place to be.
Physical theatre has been a strength of previous Kwasha! productions, and one can’t help missing this, but it is worth mentioning here that the play was rehearsed and performed as an audience-less stage play and recorded during this process.
There are a few lapses in the sound quality as a result, and nuances are lost; for example, the distinction between the noise and the “physical” presence of the Schmürz is blurred. Yet, arguably, this confusion also has the effect of conveying the playwright’s ambiguous treatment of putative threats to bourgeois banality — for instance, Vian resisted interpretations of his play that placed too much emphasis on French colonialism.
For SA audiences (audio or otherwise) who still live with the consequences of the European imperial-colonial project, this aspect of The Empire Builders has an immediacy that makes its sublimation somewhat frustrating.
Such distancing is compounded by the English translation of Vian’s text, which is rather dated in its own way and neither mimics the French dialogue nor strikes present-day English listeners with any familiarity. It will be interesting to see how Kwasha! and IFAS tackle the challenges and reap the rewards of translation and multilingualism when their collaboration returns to the stage in 2022.
