BWW Reviews: Champion Comedy in The Fugard's CHAMP

Everyone has their cross to bear. That is merely one of the things that you can take home from this revival of Louis Viljoen's CHAMP, which debuted last year during Artscape's Spring Drama Season. Currently playing a season at The Fugard Theatre, the play is an outrageous comedy that pulls no punches. Arriving with the pedigree of Viljoen's recent win at the Fleur de Cap Awards for Best New Script, CHAMP sets out to have the audience rolling in the aisles and - a few Mother Grundies aside - that is precisely what it achieves.

CHAMP deals with the experiences of three struggling actors who are playing the three bears in the children's holiday entertainment programme of a large, but probably not very classy shopping centre. Costumed in oversized bear suits, their responsibilities include walkabouts and performances in the mall. With payday and the end of the job in sight, it seems that Melvyn, Elliot and Stanley will make it through, albeit with their dignity in tatters and their sanity in threads. But then a little terror named Rodney decides to cause trouble for the trio who - under the influence of Stellenbosch's finest whiskey - decide to exact their revenge.

Viljoen's script delivers on the promise made by its award. Given that CHAMP is the kind of play that could easily descend into nothing more than a gratuitous romp through some of the more explicit profanities in the English language, Viljoen's achievements are all the more remarkable. Because while the characters are sophomoric, the play itself is not and, although backstage dramas are a staple of theatre, film and television, CHAMP finds an original spin on the genre by taking the audience behind the scenes of a kind of performance that rarely gets put under the microscope in this way.

Director Greg Karvellas, who received a Fleur du Cap nomination for the Rosalie van der Gucht Prize for New Directors for last year's run of the show, keeps things moving swiftly as the events of the narrative spiral out of control. The play pushes ahead at breakneck speed, landing joke after joke - both verbal and physical - and Karvellas generally has a good sense of which jokes to push through quickly and which to play through more slowly.

Karvellas also elicits neatly contrasting performances from his performers. Mark Elderkin and Nicholas Pauling, as the long-suffering Melvyn and short-fused Elliot respectively, deliver flawless performances. Their work is excellent: they encapsulate the characters and nail the style of the piece perfectly. Oliver Booth and Pierre Malherbe are almost as good, although their sense of the play's style and, in a very few particular moments, their comic timing needs to settle in a bit more. Jenny Stead delivers a neat cameo as The Manager of the shopping mall towards the end of the play.

The design duties for CHAMP are all under the eye of Julia Anastasopoulos, who has created the perfectly dingy environment in which the action of the piece can play out. Who would have thought that so much could be done with a water-cooler, a couple of lockers, a chair, a fire extinguisher and three bear suits?

One descriptor that has followed CHAMP from its first performances in regard to its style is Tarantino-esque. CHAMP - with its unmotivated protagonists, lighting quick verbal wit, plentiful derogatory cussing and fast comic pace - recalls more strongly the slacker comedies of Kevin Smith. CHAMP offers the same voyeuristic kick that the audience gets watching CLERKS as they go about the grimy tasks that define their day-to-day realities, because we wish we could respond to our own challenges with such raw conviction, even if society has (perhaps wisely) taught us otherwise. That is why CHAMP plays as something more than an inside joke for struggling performers and why this play has found an audience in these theatre-wary times. It is an edgy and vital piece of contemporary South African theatre.

CHAMP runs at the Fugard Theatre until 4 May 2013. Tickets cost R110 - R140 and bookings can be made at Computicket.

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