Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Contents
Dedication vii
Foreword ix
Introduction xi
Seeing Red 89
Foreword
I first came across Greig Coetzee at the Klein Karoo Nationale Kunste
Fees in Oudtshoorn in 1995/96. I was presenting Athol Fugard’s Valley
Song at the festival and our venue was plastered with posters for White
Men with Weapons, which was showing elsewhere. I immediately regis-
tered that this young man was someone to be reckoned with in the
New South Africa. His boundless energy (he used to run the Comrades
Marathon annually and never needed a break in the schedule for any
practice, just on the day of the race!) was a joy to any theatre producer,
and it was not long before we were working together. I was arranging
tours for him locally and internationally, and he was writing and perform-
ing and carrying out the many varied tasks of staging and publicising his
work with customary gusto. This was the beginning of a relationship
which has endured to this day.
I find Greig unique in his articulation of his own feelings about the
current situation in South Africa and his take on the apartheid years that
he had to negotiate as a young man growing up in South Africa. Some of
this time was as a conscripted member of the South African Defence
Force. He writes in a range of theatre forms and to date he has not settled
for one writing style but rather uses different ways to deal with different
issues. His work is engaging and incisive and his understated humour
often uses accurate observations of life at this time, in this country, on
this planet.
This publication represents the bulk of Greig’s theatre work to date,
a splendid testimony to his burgeoning talent.
Mannie Mannim
Johannesburg
xi
Introduction
urban and film culture combines Coetzee’s love of wordplay with his
sense of place. Distinctively South African, and yet strongly influenced
by popular American culture, the play is in Coetzee’s words ‘a road-
movie for the stage’. Using elements of physical theatre combined with a
strong rap beat, the clever rhyming and insistent rhythm sweep the
audience through a headlong journey to inevitable catastrophe. Providing
a virtuoso performance for the solo actor, the script suggests both
musical and visual accompaniment to provide atmosphere and a sense of
the degraded urban landscape and nightscape through which the hunted
characters flounder. Part praise-poet, part Homeric storyteller, Johnny
Boskak has transformed monologue into poetic ode as he pours out his
epic experience of love, betrayal and loss.
White Men with Weapons has been a significant play in the devel-
opment of South African theatre. It was the first play written by Greig
Coetzee to launch his career as a professional writer and performer. The
play was initially performed (1996) at a time when South African
audiences were weary of Protest Theatre and it suggested a way forward
from this genre both in terms of subject matter and form. The experience
of white males living under apartheid, and particularly the experience of
conscription, had hardly been dealt with during a period when the
struggle for black enfranchisement was clearly more urgent and im-
portant. Junction Avenue Theatre Company’s Fantastical History of a
Useless Man (1976) and Anthony Akerman’s Somewhere on the Border
(1986) had previously engaged with similar issues, but at a significantly
earlier time. The subject matter of this play acknowledges that there are
many South African stories to tell. The form of the play – a series of
monologues from a variety of different characters – was unusual. While,
in fact, it was a resourceful response to the financial hazards of staging
theatre in South Africa – one actor/writer/stage manager makes for an
economical and transportable production – it also showcased Coetzee’s
skills as a writer/performer in its instantaneous and effective transitions
through a number of complex and believable characters, all commenting
from different perspectives on a common experience. It provided Coetzee
with a form he was to work with, develop and transform in some of his
later plays. It also introduced a very distinctive voice to South African
theatre, an erudite, poetic and yet satiric style which allows audiences to
laugh at their own absurdities and wince in recognition of Coetzee’s
sharp analysis of South African realities.
xiii
White Men with Weapons has won numerous awards, both national
and international, and thus has played a role in maintaining international
interest in South African Theatre beyond the apartheid period. The
international interest in this first play of Coetzee’s also led directly to the
commissioning of his play Happy Natives by a British production com-
pany. Awards for White Men with Weapons were won for the writing, the
acting and the production – an unusually holistic excellence.
It is Coetzee’s multiple immersions in the process of theatre-making
that has ensured the success of his plays, springing as they do from a
thorough understanding and skilful use of the major elements of theatre:
action, characterisation, language and metaphor. In terms of style
Coetzee’s plays show a continuous growth in the complexity of writing
and performance, while maintaining Coetzee’s belief that character-
isation is the basis of theatre. In his earliest work, Tales from a Termite
(1995) (not included here), he uses a storytelling mode, with the
traditional simple ‘indication’, through performance, of the characters
involved in the story. Both I spy blue sky (1997) (not included here) and
The Blue Period of Milton van der Spuy (1997) examine the circum-
stances and attitudes of one complex character, whereas White Men with
Weapons and Breasts – a play about men (2000) present numerous
characters, each delivering a revelatory monologue directly to the
audience. This monologue-based style is distinctive of this phase of
Coetzee’s work, partly because of the success of these latter two plays.
The juxtaposition of different characters lends a humorous and ironic
touch as different attitudes to the predominant theme are played out. This
humour has made these plays particularly popular with audiences, and
the form has been recognised by other aspirant theatre-makers as
eminently usable, particularly for political satire. I spy blue sky and
Milton are more poignant, focussing in depth in each case on one
troubled, even dysfunctional, character. These four plays all explore a
slightly different use of the monologue form: White Men with Weapons
outlines different responses and attitudes to a common experience; I spy
blue sky includes songs as an integral part of the writing and explores a
reminiscence of childhood and growing up; The Blue Period of Milton
van der Spuy uses monologue to gradually uncover the truth of a
character and situation; and Breasts – a play about men uses monologue
to explore a variety of very different characters and responses to a single
theme.
xiv
Hazel Barnes
March 2009