Jacques and Martin are going to watch a couple of shows at the festival. I, on the other hand, am off to a do a radio interview. It won't do us any good audience-wise - the show was last night and the radio is not national so will not help with Cape Town - but I do want to help promote Musho! and I like meeting new people.
Kline, Tristan, Tafi and me - two South Africans and a Zimbabwean - are driven there by a PR guy to gagasi fm. I hear about their festival shows, all of which sound great..... if only we didn't have to get on a plane to Cape Town and could stay here and enjoy the festival. The radio show is part English part Zulu; one of the artists looks nearly as white as me but he is, in fact, Coloured, and reference is made to it; I make a joke about having a servant to ZooKey, the presenter, which does not seem to go down too well with her: we are in South Africa.
This show does what radio does so well: brings a diverse set of people together to talk to one another and the audience, who call up, speaking English, speaking Zulu..... I feel very inadequate with just Spanish and French to call on. I'm impressive for an English person - three languages, man... but that's pretty standard here: South Africa has 11 official languages and lots of people speak more than one. This fusion of the two languages is slightly disorientating for me, but from the context I am able to understand some of the Zulu, so I get to feel smug too. And it takes talent and experience to do what ZooKey does, deal with four of us in the studio, driving the desk: cueing the music, making sure the ads play as booked, while remaining open to her callers. I used to be an agent and had a couple of great radio DJ clients... if it were 14 years ago and we were in the UK, I'd so try to sign this woman.
You just cannot do this on TV, and with theatre you have a far smaller audience: radio is unique and fabulous and important. Kate loved making things for The World Service. Usually I don't like to give her a post-mortem opinion, but for once I think I can be sure that she loved radio in general, and the World Service in particular, more than the other outlets for whom she worked. TV was fine, in its way, but radio, to trot out a trope, has better pictures. Of course, when it comes to my sister, please do not forget what she never forgot: the World Service has around 700 million listeners - that was Kate's kind of audience.
Years and years ago I'd listen to Radio702 when staying in Johannesburg and hear the most incredible opinions from those calling in. Incredible to me, an ignorant outsider. It was the kind of conversation you'd just never hear on local radio in the UK: an extraordinary diversity of opinion, people exchanging very... strong opinions. Here I am, hurled into the future, but South African radio is just as exciting, fresh, challenging. I am undoubtedly the least interesting thing in the room - not very surprising - but it means I just get to listen to the exchange of ideas an watch the fast work of ZooKey.
Next we are joined by the guy who runs 99% Zulu which promotes stand-up. ZooKey gets him onto the subject of women in comedy, turns out they have just the same issues here as we do in the UK with women being under-represented in comedy. No surprises there then. I tell him about Funny Women and all the great work they do in the UK to promote female comedians and the use of comedy as a tool to free women of their fear of, say, public speaking or just, you know, speaking their mind in mixed company. I hope he'll get in contact with them.
We head back to Theatre Catalina before the second show has finished, so Tafi and I sit looking out over the harbour, waiting for the audience to come out, discussing the situation in Zimbabwe. His colleagues join us and one of them tells me about a friend of his who has been arrested for carrying out voter education. And that's not a Soviet euphemism: he was teaching people how they could vote, not how the should vote. He is clearly shaken - his friend had been accused of avoiding arrest, even though on one of the charges he was out of the country and on the other he went to court to try to hand himself in and they refused to arrest him. Kafka is alive and well, I think, and living in Zimbabwe.
I tell them about a play I performed in in November in London: One Hour Eighteen Minutes. It is the story of the death on remand of a Russian tax lawyer who uncovered the largest known tax fraud in Russian history ($230 million) and who was horribly neglected and, finally, two weeks away from when he would have to had been released and would testify against the long list of those involved, killed in prison. Tafi and I reflect upon the parallels with Zimbabwe and we talk about the idea of taking One Hour Eighteen Minutes to Zimbabwe. I say that I am sure the writer would be delighted to see her work being performed in Zimbabwe and it would be ideal as it would not be about Zim while being entirely about Zim. We also talk about getting Tafi's work to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, no mean feat if you're based in the UK, but quite another deal to get from Southern Africa to the Edinburgh Fringe.
I love radio and I love theatre - and they can both be transformative... and I don't just mean for the people who make them.
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