Kellermann plays to heart’s content in play

AS DIE BROEK PAS

DIRECTOR/DESIGNER: Marthinus Basson

ACTRESS: Antoinette Kellermann

VENUE: Barney Simon Theatre at the Market

UNTIL: June 27

RATING: ****

We are the drivers of our own destiny we are often told, but when someone like Ella Gericke bumps into the horror of her life, those decisions become murky.

At the time, this young German lass finds herself with a dead husband. Married only a couple of years, he was a crane driver who died of cancer. As she saw him disintegrating before her very eyes, she had the presence of mind to ask him at great length about the crane driving, which left her with her only chance of survival – to take on his life and thus his world.

Becoming a man might not sound as complicated as the actual act, but when you’re working with your husband’s former colleagues, you’d better watch every nuance, every gesture, which is exactly what she does as she falls into a life of crane driving and beer drinking while morphing into her man.

It is an intriguing play (translated from German to Afrikaans by Willem Anker) which is both a challenge for performer and audience. She has to take on a life and almost take on yours to make it work. But watching the director cleverly weave his magic to turn the text into something that juggles with your mind, is quite extraordinary.

He sets the time and place with footage from those devastating years as the Nazi flags worm its way into this man/woman who has to turn from one gender to the next to keep up the façade she has created. She longs for her womanhood, the memories of her Snow White, yet can blame no one as she finally was the master of her own transformation.

From poetry to an almost rhythmic rap, the words swing into cabaret as Kellermann twists and turns her life into something she cannot escape. It is the drudgery of being a woman who has to play the man which can only be sustained if the charade is never dropped. Loneliness engulfs her being as she tells her story of madness in a world turned upside down. And what is most extraordinary is the way director and actress pursue the story and tease its every nuance and detail and so slowly unfold the torturous life it leads to.

Basson perfectly captures the world of this woman-turned-man with visual hints that jerk the mind and memory, while Kellermann plays to her heart’s content in a bravura performance that blows hot and cold as her character hits highs and lows in this painfully protracted life that isn’t hers to own.

It is the perfect storm with Wolfie Britz and Basson throwing light on the production in a way that casts shadows, offers nowhere to hide and illuminates hidden corners in the soul.

It’s the performance and the production that overwhelm and linger as the curtain is drawn on a side of life that was spent horribly hidden from the world.

As we fight to live, we often become a prisoner to our own survival. It is all about the cost that isn’t considered when we make those life-changing choices.

It’s welcome back to Afrikaans theatre at The Market, all of which broadens the theatre base around the country. We are too few in this country to limit the exchanges between languages and regions. With Basson and Kellerman, James Ngcobo started with the best.