In Zurich
by the gold mines,
We’re
having our best times - Carl Becker and the
Aeroplanes.
I got to know Barney Simon in Yeoville, Johannesburg in
198... I was in my twenties. I had recently lost my last parent and inherited
enough money to live on. I had also
just aided and abetted my expulsion from the army on the grounds of insanity.
And Yeoville, interestingly enough, was one of the few places in South Africa
that you could live in and feel sane. Outside of those places, if you were
white, you were generally in support of the regime. Or hadn’t thought to
question it. Yeoville, bless it, was full of artists, activists, students,
musicians, actors and other misfits loosely unified by their hatred of the
great white lie. It was a place of interior exile, a delightful hilly little
Switzerland and we burrowed in as happily as Lenin in Zurich.
Thus ensconced, and with encouragement of Claire
Stopford and Lynne Maree, I wrote a play about my military adventures. It was
called National Madness. It was the van guard of a small column of army plays
that followed it into the decade, each one at war with the lying idiocy of the
media and the state. Nicky Rebelo, also
still horrified by his army experiences, saw National Madness.
Nicky was going into production, and, as I understand
it, a very difficult relationship with Barney, on a piece he had written. It
was called Outers. Outers is the place a South African goes when he has no
home. The production was aimed for the Market Theatre main stage. An
extraordinary cast was already committed. Nicky recommended me to his director,
Barney Simon.
Outers came out of research that Nicky had done among
the white tramps in Joubert Park. (There was apartheid even there, and they
would have no ‘blackies” in their methylated, leafy domain.) The writing was,
is, remarkable, unequalled in it’s ear for the lyricism of the gutter. But
there was a clash between writer and director/writer. Barney loved the piece
and it’s subject, but he had a problem with the fact that Nicky had used a
concealed tape recorder to gain the original material. Outers had extraordinary
and authentic dialogue and characters, and, Barney felt, a moral and structural
problem. He didn’t want the character from the ordinary world, the character
that the audience would most identify with, to be secretly taping. And he was
not convinced by the way Nicky, as writer, had dealt with the problem. The
result was that while Outers is unequivocally Nicky’s play, Barney was writing
the part of Richard, which I played, well into the rehearsal process. I
got what I was always asking my agent for: to be challenged as an actor.
And Barney, I
think, got challenged as a director. While sometimes effective, I was a limited
actor. So Barney and I did a lot of one-on-one work over weekends. We’d break
to get a boerewors roll from the Steers Take-away round the corner from his
house next to the park. These, he said, were subtly spiced. When we were eating
he would say: “Do it now.” I’d have to
work the speech we were busy with
around the boerewors roll. He was persistent like that. And sometimes
frightening. Three quarters of an hour before we opened he was still rehearsing
me.
“Don’t worry about the moves” he said, “I can block
it any time.”
He just wanted to believe what he was seeing. And
now, when I am directing, I have exactly the same feeling. It either works or
it doesn’t. It’s true or it isn’t.
Outers was well received by the profession, but not
by the critics. The life of the gentlemen of the road was, I suspect, only
steps away from their reality. The piece frightened them. But years afterwards
I found myself at table at the Troyeville Hotel with Lara Foote, one of South
Africa’s most accomplished directors.
Somehow the subject of Barney came up and I told her about three young school
girls who had watched the show. Their wide-eyed awe and excitement as they
experienced the production from the front row had lived with me ever since.
“That was me! That was me!” said Lara.
She told me the production inspired her to study theatre.
It was certainly extraordinary to rehearse. Barney
sent us out into the streets of Johannesburg temporarily stripped of privilege.
Because we went dirty and worn, doors opened into new worlds. I found myself
near the station being used as bait in a gambling game. I won two rand, and a
richer mark, seeing, stepped forward for the taking. The con artist had spotted my innocence, which was real, and made
brisk use of it. I got a lesson: the street is richer than you think. It has
levels that you cannot experience if you walk through it in a suite.
Looking for something in the character of Richard
which I was not prepared to explore for him, Barney sent me three times to the
public toilet in Joubert Park. I think he was uncertain where to go with
Richard. He was sniffing around the gay world that he would navigate later in
plays like Score me the Ages. I met, on my third visit , a man whose injured
arm oozed through a bandage. He told me that he really should go to the Joburg
General, but he was scared that they would hurt him. The gay thing never
happened and Richard became, as I had been briefly in real life, a deserter
from the army.
Barney never used me as an actor again, but the
experience had made us friends. I’d
have breakfast at his house and we would share the occasional joint. And once
or twice we walked dogs together. We laughed a lot. When my second play, Hellhound, appeared at the Market Theatre it
opened under his sheltering wing.
I didn’t go to Barney’s funeral but I write with a
piece of sculpture from his house close by my head. I believe that he, like
James Phillips, the late great rock star of the eighties who got no airplay
because he told the truth, comes to visit me occasionally when I do certain
kinds of work. Barney and James never
worked together, or even knew each other well, but they shared many qualities.
Their roots were in down-market Joburg suburbs. They both owned an profound
moral insight, a delightful sense of humour, a love of Durban’s finest hemp, an
ability alchemise high art out of authentic South African Experience. They both
died around the time apartheid did.
When the TASC production of King Lear opened on the Standard Bank
Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown in 1998 and Sean Taylor and Jennifer Stein
and the rest of the cast rose magnificently to the occasion, I was very proud.
I felt that Barney and James lived again in that work. And I knew that
they had contributed to it’s being alive. It was built on foundations they had
laid.
Barney knew when a thing was true - a performance, a
play, the delivery of a line. He saw it, and he knew. He had a glimpse of God,
Barney. He ruled nothing out. He didn’t judge.
He knew that the good, like the evil, is in the detail. His eye stripped off all status and made us
equal. He had a glimpse of God, and he stayed true to it, and it made him
great.