BWW Reviews: SMAARTIES a Committed Look at Schizophrenia as Performance

Two plays dealing with mental illness by up-and-coming theatre-makers have appeared on fringe stages in Cape Town this year. After a premiere at the National Arts Festival, Wynne Bredenkamp presented SALT at the Cape Town Fringe and, now, Jannes Erasmus's SMAARTIES has opened for a season at the Alexander Bar and Café's Upstairs Theatre. The two productions explore the same territory in widely divergent ways, although both make use of a common set of signifiers: auditory hallucinations, confused thought processes and apparently false memories. In SALT, schizophrenia became a symbol for abandoned realities as competing narratives clashed within one character's mind. In SMAARTIES, performance becomes a metaphor for schizophrenia, with everything in Erasmus's script to Quintin Wils's design and direction and Jaco Jansen van Rensburg's videography calculated to a embody a single character's psychosis.

SMAARTIES begins as the audience enters the theatre space, framing itself as an experience of observed behaviour, with Mr Lotz trying at first simply to articulate words and then trying to articulate words that make meaning. Trying to establish the facts of what led to the death of both his parents, Lotz delves into memory, responding to the voices of his parents and a surviving younger sister who desperately needs his care as though they are in the room with him. The story he tells becomes a violent assemblage of his personal history, a collage the individual components of which are tattered with ambiguity as Lotz slips in and out of English and Afrikaans, through past and present, from truth to interpretation and between imagination and reality.

As such, Erasmus uses SMAARTIES as a vehicle to explore the nature schizophrenia; the underlying narrative assumes a secondary position to its thematic concerns. The piece takes an overtly intense approach to its content, although a dark sense of absurd humour lurks around on the periphery of the script. Erasmus's writing has a devilish way of plays with language. The inscriptions of the word droom (meaning "dream") on Lotz's chest, for instance, is a palindrome for the inscription on his back; elsewhere, schizophrenia becomes inter-linguistic homophone "skiet-zophhrenia" (with skiet meaning "shoot"), opening up a multiplicity of interpretations.

In performing his own script, Erasmus works with forceful physicality, playing Lotz as though his body is responding to a never-ending series of stimuli. His vocal work, for the most part, is equally dexterous, with many vocal tics built into his delivery. If there is one thing he does not fully capture in interpreting his writing, it is the dark vein of humour that pulsates in the work. Playing more strongly into the irony and wit that lurks in the shadows of the piece would counter the slight sense of the piece taking itself too seriously and draw the audience even further into Lotz's world and the state of mind in which he finds himself.

This balance is one that needs to be negotiated similarly in Wils's direction of SMAARTIES, which otherwise finds a great deal of light and shade in the play and delivers some compelling imagery in its stage composition. Wils's direction works seamlessly with his design, which works with a basic palette of white and cream materials, with a backdrop filled with words dominating the space. A semi-circle of lamps separates the audience from the performer; these are used to enhance the lighting design as well as to represent the voices that echo in Lotz's head, which are also reinforced through Jansen van Rensburg's videography. There is a sense of ingenuity in the design cannot be obscured by its simplicity.

Walking away from SMAARTIES, I found myself taken by the commitment to creating a compelling theatrical experience. There was a great deal of talent at play in SMAARTIES, and talent that was working hard to create a meaningful experience for contemporary audiences. What was missing, given the migration of schizophrenia in the piece from narrative device to theme, was a sense of re-examining the nature of schizophrenia and its treatment - the "smaarties" referenced in the title - as it is perceived in our collective understanding. SMAARTIES remains in the realm of the concrete, reinforcing known assumptions and attitudes towards the disorder.

SMAARTIES runs at the Alexander Bar & Café until 29 November. Performances take place at 9pm and tickets cost R90 (or R80 prepaid) and can be booked online at shows.alexanderbar.co.za or at Alexander Bar itself. For telephone bookings and enquiries, call 021 300 1652. Alexander Bar & Café is on the corner of Strand and Loop Streets in the Cape Town CBD. The bar is open Mondays to Saturdays from 11am until at least 1am. Strictly no under-18s are allowed in the venue due to the liquor license.

To post a comment, you must register and login.