In 2008, I was in my second year at the University of the Witwatersrand studying Dramatic Arts. I recall the day of January 2008, when I received a call from the Production Manager, Carol Prestine from the Wits Theatre. She said "You have to come back early from your holidays I need a Stage Manager for the theatre production called You Fool, How Can The Sky Fall? and the director is James Ngcobo" my face lightened up with excitement and that I was to work with one of best theatre and screen actors in South Africa, yet there was little doubts on my decision because my holidays were suddenly shortened .
My task as the Stage Manager was to manage and organise the following areas; building of the stage, design of the costumes, design of the stage lights, sound, props and artists make up. Over and above these duties, I was the master of communications between the Production Manager, Theatre Manager, Stage Designer, Workshop (stage builders), Cast Members, Crew Members and the Director . I must admit that I was inexperinced and thrown in the deep blue sea to swim with the sharks and I had to keep my head above the water until the last day of the play.
On our first rehearsal I was with the cast and the director reading through the script. There was excitement and laughter, the cast found the text loaded with humour yet it addressed serious issues in the South African political sphere.
The play received good media coverage and attendance. It was the most talked about play at the Wits Theatre, and around Wits Main Campus. I'm glad that I walked the walk of characters with the actors as it was moulding and shaping up to be one of the best theatre play I have seen at the Wits Theatre.
Zakes Mda talks about "You Fool, How Can The Sky Fall?" and other works.
First Appeared
Saturday, 08 March 2008
THE WEEKENDER
That congenitally unhappy Irishman, Samuel Becket, is probably top of the list of famous theatrical control freaks. The Nobel prize-winning playwright was insistent that his characters interact onstage in precisely the way that he envisioned when he penned his script; he was the bane of many a director and actor, whose creative licence was undermined by Beckett’s authorial commands. When Waiting for Godot became an international sensation, however, and was performed in different languages by different companies across the globe, Beckett had to resign himself to letting others present his great play to the world.
In a sense, this is the benchmark of a successful playwright: your work is performed so widely that you know longer know what is being put on which stage, where, when and by whom. Certainly, it is true of Zakes Mda, who only learned that his play You Fool, How Can The Sky Fall? was running at the Wits Theatre when I contacted him for an interview. Yet Mda, unlike Beckett, is happy for others to take the responsibility of giving life to his words. “When a play leaves my hands,” he tells me, “it’s in another realm.”
In his Director’s Note for this production, James Ngcobo writes: “Another year, another Zakes Mda play. Why? I love the fact that he goes out of his way to say something ... Characters in this play embark on a journey that is a mirror image of the reality out there.” One would be forgiven, having read this, for thinking that You Fool, How Can The Sky Fall? is a new play. It was actually written about fifteen years ago, in between Mda’s first forays into prose fiction, Ways of Dying and She Plays with the Darkness (both published in 1995). By then, he had already written 30 stage plays; as he puts it, “I discovered novels quite late.” But when Ways of Dying was given the M-Net Book Prize – he won a host of literary awards for subsequent novels – Mda’s reputation as a novelist began to eclipse his status as a playwright.
Even though he became accustomed to collaboration while working with theatre practitioners, Mda a
dmits that he now enjoys the more autonomous (albeit lonelier) activity of novel-writing. Be that as it may, he finds much of his time nowadays is taken up producing film scripts: he is working on an original screenplay, having already written film adaptations of two of his novels, The Whale-Caller and Heart of Redness. Asked about the challenges posed by these different genres, Mda is candid: “Film is not a writers’ medium. It’s writing by committee, there’s no way of escaping that – after the first draft, you’re no longer in charge – whereas a novelist has more control. Writing for the stage is somewhere between the two. But film scripts pay the mortgage!”
Mda is pragmatic about writing as a vocation. Our conversation is peppered with references to agents, royalties and texts being “auctioned off”. “I do what I enjoy most of the time, and I enjoy what I do,” he says. “But one writes because one has to earn a living.”
This financial nous is more common in the literary circles of the USA, where Mda has been based for much of his writing life, than amongst South African writers. Most of his novels have been written in American locales such as Connecticut, Vermont and Ohio (he is currently a professor in the English Department at Ohio University). Two decades ago, he would have been classed as a writer-in-exile; nowadays, he considers himself “a migrant worker” or “a commuter”, given that he shuttles between SA and the States.
In You Fool, there is a character called “Young Man”, an artist bent on vengeance after being maligned and abused by the State. His chequered history includes a stint in the suburbs – an experience that, he complains, was dull and artistically uninspiring because it was not like “real life” as most people experience it, in which poverty, violence and crime are pervasive. I suggest that perhaps, to a writer aware of South African realities, life in America must be something like this. Mda disagrees: “When I’m in SA, I form part of the middle class, so I also live in bourgeois surroundings when I’m at home – probably even more so than in the US, where I have relatively less money!”
Nevertheless, the major themes of You Fool are specific to a post-colonial, non-Western environment. The play is a study of the apparent inevitability of dictatorship in countries that have recently gained independence. If the question is “Why are there so many dictators in Africa?”, the play offers an answer that depends neither on political or historical explanations. Rather, it seems to suggest, the urge to create, worship and then overthrow secular gods is part of human nature. Mda comments: “We create these idols in order to destroy them.”
The playtext may date back to the early 1990s, but Ngcobo and his cast of young actors have given You Fool some contemporary inflections. For instance, the character of the Minister of Health has certain “Manto-esque” attributes – including a hat decorated with cloves of garlic. Of course, this doesn’t work entirely, as the Minister of Health in the play is a dissenting voice, opposed to the yes-men of the cabinet who submit to the every whim of “the wise one” their president; Tshabalala-Msimang and Thabo Mbeki, on the other hand, have been thick as thieves over the past few years.
Still, the links to SA do allow the audience to apply the play’s critiques to local subjects: the corruption and incompetence of high-ranking government officials who are utterly out of touch with the larger populace, or the dangerous effects of a narcissistic and neurotic leader who is prone to “introspection” rather than good governance.
Mda pays careful attention to my description of these shifts, but at the same time he reminds me that when he wrote You Fool, “De Klerk was still in power. I really wasn’t thinking about SA. I was thinking of post-independence African and South American countries. The play was meant to function as an extended metaphor, not a literal, documentary representation of life in a post-colonial country.”
He is also interested by the racial undertones created in this production (quite apart from the symbolic resonances of a black cast whose faces are painted into white masks, there are a handful of textual additions that refer to race): “My characters in the script don’t have any racial markers. When I wrote the play, I didn’t have black and white people in mind; it was first performed in SA by both black and white actors.”
Ultimately, however, Mda defers to Ngcobo (they worked together while both of them were involved with the Market Theatre) and his colleagues in their interpretation of the work. Indeed, he is evasive when pressed to provide further insight into the play. Asked about “the shadows”, the mysterious offstage figures who abduct and torture the members of the cabinet – even though they have wealth and power, the ministers also seem to be imprisoned and live in constant fear – Mda is unhelpful: “How would I know? I would rather hear what you say. Sometimes I hardly remember the details of a play. What is the joy of writing if I interpret it myself? That’s your job.”
In his Director’s Note for this production, James Ngcobo writes: “Another year, another Zakes Mda play. Why? I love the fact that he goes out of his way to say something ... Characters in this play embark on a journey that is a mirror image of the reality out there.” One would be forgiven, having read this, for thinking that You Fool, How Can The Sky Fall? is a new play. It was actually written about fifteen years ago, in between Mda’s first forays into prose fiction, Ways of Dying and She Plays with the Darkness (both published in 1995). By then, he had already written 30 stage plays; as he puts it, “I discovered novels quite late.” But when Ways of Dying was given the M-Net Book Prize – he won a host of literary awards for subsequent novels – Mda’s reputation as a novelist began to eclipse his status as a playwright.
Even though he became accustomed to collaboration while working with theatre practitioners, Mda a
dmits that he now enjoys the more autonomous (albeit lonelier) activity of novel-writing. Be that as it may, he finds much of his time nowadays is taken up producing film scripts: he is working on an original screenplay, having already written film adaptations of two of his novels, The Whale-Caller and Heart of Redness. Asked about the challenges posed by these different genres, Mda is candid: “Film is not a writers’ medium. It’s writing by committee, there’s no way of escaping that – after the first draft, you’re no longer in charge – whereas a novelist has more control. Writing for the stage is somewhere between the two. But film scripts pay the mortgage!”
Mda is pragmatic about writing as a vocation. Our conversation is peppered with references to agents, royalties and texts being “auctioned off”. “I do what I enjoy most of the time, and I enjoy what I do,” he says. “But one writes because one has to earn a living.”
This financial nous is more common in the literary circles of the USA, where Mda has been based for much of his writing life, than amongst South African writers. Most of his novels have been written in American locales such as Connecticut, Vermont and Ohio (he is currently a professor in the English Department at Ohio University). Two decades ago, he would have been classed as a writer-in-exile; nowadays, he considers himself “a migrant worker” or “a commuter”, given that he shuttles between SA and the States.
In You Fool, there is a character called “Young Man”, an artist bent on vengeance after being maligned and abused by the State. His chequered history includes a stint in the suburbs – an experience that, he complains, was dull and artistically uninspiring because it was not like “real life” as most people experience it, in which poverty, violence and crime are pervasive. I suggest that perhaps, to a writer aware of South African realities, life in America must be something like this. Mda disagrees: “When I’m in SA, I form part of the middle class, so I also live in bourgeois surroundings when I’m at home – probably even more so than in the US, where I have relatively less money!”
Nevertheless, the major themes of You Fool are specific to a post-colonial, non-Western environment. The play is a study of the apparent inevitability of dictatorship in countries that have recently gained independence. If the question is “Why are there so many dictators in Africa?”, the play offers an answer that depends neither on political or historical explanations. Rather, it seems to suggest, the urge to create, worship and then overthrow secular gods is part of human nature. Mda comments: “We create these idols in order to destroy them.”
The playtext may date back to the early 1990s, but Ngcobo and his cast of young actors have given You Fool some contemporary inflections. For instance, the character of the Minister of Health has certain “Manto-esque” attributes – including a hat decorated with cloves of garlic. Of course, this doesn’t work entirely, as the Minister of Health in the play is a dissenting voice, opposed to the yes-men of the cabinet who submit to the every whim of “the wise one” their president; Tshabalala-Msimang and Thabo Mbeki, on the other hand, have been thick as thieves over the past few years.
Still, the links to SA do allow the audience to apply the play’s critiques to local subjects: the corruption and incompetence of high-ranking government officials who are utterly out of touch with the larger populace, or the dangerous effects of a narcissistic and neurotic leader who is prone to “introspection” rather than good governance.
Mda pays careful attention to my description of these shifts, but at the same time he reminds me that when he wrote You Fool, “De Klerk was still in power. I really wasn’t thinking about SA. I was thinking of post-independence African and South American countries. The play was meant to function as an extended metaphor, not a literal, documentary representation of life in a post-colonial country.”
He is also interested by the racial undertones created in this production (quite apart from the symbolic resonances of a black cast whose faces are painted into white masks, there are a handful of textual additions that refer to race): “My characters in the script don’t have any racial markers. When I wrote the play, I didn’t have black and white people in mind; it was first performed in SA by both black and white actors.”
Ultimately, however, Mda defers to Ngcobo (they worked together while both of them were involved with the Market Theatre) and his colleagues in their interpretation of the work. Indeed, he is evasive when pressed to provide further insight into the play. Asked about “the shadows”, the mysterious offstage figures who abduct and torture the members of the cabinet – even though they have wealth and power, the ministers also seem to be imprisoned and live in constant fear – Mda is unhelpful: “How would I know? I would rather hear what you say. Sometimes I hardly remember the details of a play. What is the joy of writing if I interpret it myself? That’s your job.”
I take up his challenge and suggest that there is a strain of imagery in his work affirming that human frailty is shared by rich and poor, powerful and powerless alike – that the decrepitude of the body is a great leveller. Many characters in his novels have physical problems, such as unpleasant body odour or incontinence, and in You Fool the much-praised president suffers from a festering wound on his leg that never heals. “Now that you point it out,” Mda accedes, “yes, I agree with that. I hadn’t thought of it before. There are many things that we writers do that we’re not conscious about.”
I’m about to protest that such a lack of self-awareness is disingenuous, when Mda changes his tone: “While I take each work on its own terms, with each text I’m the same writer, so I guess I bring the same issues, the same life experience.” And, he concludes playfully, his latest novel (he won’t mention the title) is “meta-fictional”: “The book I’m working on at the moment is self-reflexive, it emphasises its own modes of creation and the devices that I use. In that case, I suppose I’m playing both the creator and the critic.”http://www.christhurman.net/art-and-culture/item/mdas-old-play-given-modern-interpretation.html
A follow up tweet between I and Zakes Mda about "You Fool How Can The Sky Fall?
ReplyDeleteNhlanhla Sibiya @Nhlanhla3
When you wrote the play "You Fool, How Can The Sky Fall? did you have a vision in your mind that some of the incidents will happen in reality @ZakesMda
Zakes Mda @ZakesMda
@Nhlanhla3 It's easy to be a prophet because human beings never learn from history - they repeat the same folly