Acclaimed actress Anna-Mart van der Merwe sheds light on her role in The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek
|||WHEN Anna-Mart van der Merwe sheepishly admitted to old friend Andre Odendaal that she had never worked on an Athol Fugard play, the director obliged by casting her in People are Living There at the Market Theatre last year.That is where she met set designer Nadhya Cohen, who had worked on the original production and told her some colourful stories about working with Yvonne Bryceland.
“Then, one day she said to me: ‘Do you know that as we are rehearsing here, Athol Fugard is rehearsing his new play at the Signature Theatre in New York?’” Van der Merwe remembers.So, when she was approached about Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek it just felt like it was meant to be.
“I thought, in terms of the theatre landscape and the cultural landscape of our country that if I could, before I die, go through this process with him. Wow,” Van der Merwe enthused.
She was touched by how she could get a sense of who Bryceland and Fugard were at the time when People are Living There was written, and now working on this new play, Van der Merwe has come to realise that the playwright’s strength lies in creating fully realised, recognisable people.
“Athol has an uncanny sense to not preach, but to show us as South Africans, with all our pain and all our questions and identity issues, and with all our political issues, without preaching. He creates characters who are true human beings through which all these themes – on a very human and real level, but also extremely symbolic and philosophic, and yes, political level – come out.”
She plays Elmarie Kleynhans, a farmer’s wife who wants one of the farm workers to paint pretty pictures, not ugly ones. Nukain Mabuza (played by Tshamano Sebe) has spent his life painting rocks on the koppie on the farm and this conversation about his work lays bare rifts in understanding between cultures as apartheid was hurtling to its end.
The first act is set in 1981 and in the second act an older Elmarie meets the original artist’s grandson (Sne Dladla) and their encounter confronts the legacy created in the first.
“With the Milly character that he created (in People are Living There), I found it astounding that if you listen to Milly clearly, through the philosophies of life and her understanding of pain and humanity, yes, sometimes in a very ugly way, he didn’t judge. He has such an empathy for the human condition. I find that comes through in the play now as well. Elmarie Kleynhans, through all the characters in the play, he is looking at big racial issues, big political stuff, but through human beings.
“With Athol, the constant cry of human to human, doesn’t matter what you look like, is to say: ‘Can you hear me, can you see me?’”
Van der Merwe sees a weirdly funny kind of positivity in the Elmarie character of the first half because she is rooted in the rightness of her thinking and actions, versus the character’s fear and uncertainty in the second half because of all the negative things that have happened.
“For me to go back was to try not to put my understanding onto the character. I tried to imagine. I was in matric in 1981 and grew up in a town and not on a farm. But, I tried to imagine 40-year-olds around me and tried to remember … in honour of Athol’s writing as well; I tried to steer away from stereotypically making it an AWB tannie. What he does show is that if you believe something so intrinsically, it’s the most beautiful thing. It is very inspirational, but it is very dangerous as well. The certainty of the rightness, that this is who we are and where we are meant to be.”
In the second half everything has changed for the Elmarie character who finds herself in the midst of farm murders and she is tired and scared.
“What does that do to someone? That shift is wonderful. What happens between the two of them is quite fascinating.”
The Elmarie role is nothing like what Van der Merwe is like in real life, but she was intrigued by it, because she sees it as her responsibility as a storyteller to tell even the most painful stories. “This is what theatre is. We don’t preach: we are supposed to inform, to shock, to let people see it for what it is. I am Afrikaans and it is my inheritance to call a spade and spade and, if a spade needs to be a spade, I have to be that spade. It doesn’t matter what the toll is it takes, it is what we have to do. The more we start having dialogue, the more we sit down and, as painful as it is, start unpacking stuff, the better.”
The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, The Fugard Theatre, August 23 to September 24. Tickets: R140 to R180 from Computicket or call 021 461 45564.
