Everything, everywhere, all at once
The rise and rise of actor and theatre-maker Wessel Pretorius
Actor, playwright, screenwriter and theatre director Wessel Pretorius has been strangely anxious about his trip to Europe to perform the role of Mephisto in Faustus in Africa!, an expensive revival and reworking of the 1995 production featuring live actors, charcoal animations and astonishing puppetry. Helmed by directors William Kentridge and Lara Foot, featuring a top-notch cast and exacting production values, it’s an astonishing theatrical event, polished and professional, with significant international financial backing. Which is why it’s currently abroad for a six-week tour.
Expectations for Faustus in Africa! are huge, yet it’s not the show, nor the thought of getting lost in foreign cities, nor even the physical labour of theatre move-ins, performing in new spaces and various connecting trips between venues in different cities that have had Pretorius in a knot.
Rather, there’ve been pangs of FOMO. This is the first of three such European tours scheduled for the year, and his biggest worry is that he’ll be missing several of the arts festivals that have been his bread and butter for over a decade.
“When we heard that Faustus is travelling overseas, I was on the one hand so grateful, but on the other hand, I was sad that I won’t be able to do the Vrystaat Arts Festival, or go to Aardklop. These festivals are very much our lifeblood, something I’ve been doing for the last 12 years and they’re the only thing I know. I’ve performed in school halls more than I’ve performed in actual theatres. It’s pretty rare to have an actual dressing room.
“At one recent festival, I directed two shows, performed in another, and had one 20-minute show that was playing in a tent. It was like everything, everywhere, all at once. Some of these shows are fortunate enough to get to go to the next festival and then the next festival. The festivals have become a substitute for the old state-run performing arts councils. Instead of working for a repertory company, today’s theatre-makers have this dynamic festival circuit.”
Not that South African festival-goers will entirely miss out on Pretorius’s creative endeavours while he’s out of the country. On the programme at this year’s National Arts Festival at the end of June is Die een wat bly (the one who stays), which Pretorius directed and wrote alongside the cast.
With it, Pretorius has navigated into new genre territory. While his plays have always tended to be physical, and often comically so, this is his first time working with dancers, and his first time creating a “play” that might just as credibly be called a dance show, or physical theatre.
The show was initiated by Figure of 8 Dance Theatre and originated from an idea the company’s principals, Grant van Ster and Shaun Oelf, had of telling a kind of streams-of-consciousness story about their own mothers – about mothers whose sons are gay.
“They wanted to create a play with a strong dance element and they wanted to tell the story about their mothers and about being the queer son... and the relationship queers sons have with their mothers,” says Pretorius. “This is something I find endlessly fascinating and something think about a lot in my own life.”
Starring Oelf, Van Ster and actor Daneel Van Der Walt, it’s in many ways an homage to childhood, those memories that are filtered by the passage of time and by the thoughts that interfere with the way in which memories are formed. Watching it is like slipping into a dream; when I saw it at Suidoosterfees, I was buoyed, invigorated, heartbroken, and genuinely carried away. The closest I’ve come to describing how it made me feel is to say that it was like being inside a René Magritte painting, a surreal universe where memory, dreams and the subconscious slip, slide and sometimes collide with reality.
It has the effect, too, of leaving you suspended in an altered state.
It’s powerful stuff. The sort that makes you feel far more than it encourages you to think. While the poetry of the words washed through me, the play’s resonance was felt in my gut, not in my mind. For 75 minutes, I was witness to a living dream: very beautiful, very powerfully executed.
It was a strong reminder of theatre’s potency, its potential to transport us.
Pretorius says the response to the show has been surprising. “It was a surprise because it’s actually a very small show. It looks quite big, perhaps, because a lot more people are involved than are usually involved in the stuff that I make. My plays are typically very much independently produced. This show was given money. Has been given wings to fly.”
Some of that money has come from Festival Enterprise Catalyst (FEC), which supports new works, specifically enabling them to travel to more festivals, grow and indeed fly, find wider audiences, and – yes – look “bigger” than their physical dimensions might otherwise suggest.
The fact is that Pretorius and his cast created something that not only feels bigger than the sum of its parts, that transcends the physical dimensions of what it is – a three-hander that is somewhere at the crossroads between dance theatre, physical theatre and dramatised dream – but that, thanks to its theatricality, sends you back out into the world feeling like you’ve spent time away from reality. It possesses some special spark, something magical that transports you far from the here and now.
Pretorius loves work that is literary but not literal. “Something that uses words to sort of go against the grain of the literal and breaks open the imagination even further,” is how he describes the kind of text that interests him. “When I read poetry, I seldom ‘get’ what I’m reading; I kind of just let it wash over me. But I’m left with some residue of feeling or imagination that usually sits underneath the skin.”
He says it’s this ethereal, indefinable quality that he’s reaching for with theatre. “If I can leave people feeling as though their body temperature has changed, then I feel like I’ve done my job. I think that only happens when you avoid tying them into those literal things that they see in everyday life. That’s why I work minimalistically. Because then people can project their own imaginations onto what’s happening on stage.”
Looking at his work and hearing his speak about his process, you might assume he’s been hanging in theatres all his life, writing since before the nappies came off.
That’s not the case at all.
“The reason I went into the arts is because my life at home was so incredibly average and boring,” he says. “Boring is a terrible thing to say, but I have a very middle-class, Christian nationalist family background. My father had many jobs, but was a plumber for most of my childhood. My mother was a teacher. Acting definitely wasn’t on the cards other than maybe as a weekend hobby. They were incredibly sport-frenzied people for whom rugby is worshipped just below god. I fell in love with movies. Those were my escape.”
In pre-Inniebos Nelspruit, where he grew up, he didn’t even see a play until he was 18. And it took a lot of parental persuading for him to end up at drama school in Stellenbosch.
He says that after graduating from university, “it was like a wasteland out there, nothing except castings for ads, which depressed me no end”.
But the wasteland also fired up the need to make work. “I knew nobody was going to offer me Hamlet, so I had to create something just to keep myself motivated and busy. That’s why I wrote Ont-. I booked four nights at a venue in Stellenbosch, and I told myself that, come hell or high water, I was going to fill those four slots with a show.”
He did. And he’s never looked back.
He says that, while creating Ont-, he was going through a lot of “personal angsty stuff” – his mom’s cancer diagnosis, a boyfriend breaking up with him, and he’d moved from Stellenbosch to Cape Town. It all fuelled his creative fire. “I had a lot going on inside, and so when I sat down and started writing I realised that it was a way for me to actually articulate all of these very intense emotions, and use theatre as an outlet.”
He recently revisited Ont-, directing a new production of it for KKNK. “I did it with Wian Taljaard in the role. It was phenomenal to return to it, because I can’t remember who wrote it. I don’t know who that version of me was. I was 24 when I first did Ont-, and I performed it until I was 29, yet it’s now so removed from me. I wanted Wian to do it because he’s basically the exact same age now that I was when I performed it for the first time in 2010.
“That was at a time when I was very interested in Grotowski and a school of theatre that only uses the body and space and very little else. I still work that way, I think… I still feel that’s the way to go.”
Which is perhaps why Pretorius finds such a strong affinity with the physicality and poetry of Die een wat bly. He says part of the strength of the show is that it was created specifically for dancers – performers who weren’t trained in acting, whose bodies create the vocabulary.
He says there’s something instinctive in the way dancers process ideas and communicate feelings and thoughts and memories through physical expression. It meant that he had to approach writing the show in a different way, was able to strip away much of the prosaic, literary elements.
Die een wat bly flowed out of “lots of conversations” and from “a hotbed of memories and feelings and opinions”.
“I just jotted down everybody’s vague memories of what they’d experienced growing up and their relationship with their mother,” says Pretorius. “Grant’s mother passed away and Shaun’s father passed away on the way to the hospital while his mother was going to give birth to him – those realities were there and I wrote from what I remembered in order to weave everybody’s stories together. It included my own memories and that became the master copy of the play.
“During a read-through with the cast, I saw that it didn’t quite work... so I went and stripped down the text a bit and was reminded that, since it’s dance piece, I could rely on these incredible poets of physicality to do a lot of the work… So, although I’ve worded it very precisely, it is born from our collective stories.”
While Pretorius says he wasn’t specifically trained in physical theatre, he has a strong affinity for the work of Complicité, a UK theatre company known for its extreme use of movement, with the Jacques Lecoq school of physical theatre, and with the approach of local actor-director Sylvaine Strike, who is known for work grounded in strong physicality.
“I’m not a choreographer so I relied on the performers’ physicality and their instincts as movers. Later, Natalie Fisher come in to punctuate and clean up the choreography and put all the movement together.”
Although Pretorius won’t be in the country to see the show being performed in Makhanda, he says the National Arts Festival was pivotal in helping launch his career. “Way back when I starting doing Undone [an English version of Ont-], I took the show to the Vienna Festival in Austria, and the AfroVibes Festival in the Netherlands. The organisers had seen me at NAF, and then they invited me to tour.”
He says that, even with his overseas engagements, the festivals will continue to be at the heart of his work. “I think the people who run these festivals, the people who make them happen and the artists who attend are the most resourceful people in the world. Aardklop was dead at one stage and then the powers that be managed to revive it and now it’s back on track and better than ever.”
Also difficult to ignore is the rush he gets from performing in the more rugged context of a festival – without all the relative extravagance he’s no doubt experiencing on tour in Europe with Kentridge and company. “For years, I performed only at festivals,” he says. “You become a bit addicted. It’s the unknown. The unexpected. And the adrenaline.”
What a lovely and informative piece.