A day-long lesson in humility

11 April 2013
Bartelt is, in general, far more experienced* than am I. However, we are both very experienced when it comes to conferences: he is used to being a guest performer and speaker and I am used to handing out the badges, pointing to the toilets, explaining it's just one goody bag each to people who earn at least four times what I do. Between us we really do have all the bases covered.
As has been the case all over South Africa, and over both of us hangs the fact that we are now days away from leaving though we try not to mention it, we make friends here in Hilton, real friends: people we engage with on facebook almost right away! One of them is Sheryl, who works for Hilton, the school at which the event is being held. She has two great kids who are volunteering here and we all laugh together, and talk, obviously. Sheryl is clearly very good at her job whilst remaining open and lovely. We also make friends with one of the teachers - she teaches drama to lots of teenage boys and I suggest the idea of Black Watch to her as something her students might find engaging - I mention it's one of the best pieces of theatre I have seen in my life. We exchange ideas and get excited about life in general and theatre in particular - Joclyn's energy is just infectious. I wish she'd been my drama teacher when I was at school. In fact, I wish my school had taught drama... but that's another over-privileged moan for another over-privileged day.
As well as the marvelous people, we have also benefitted from seeing great work here in RSA and this conference is no exception. There is a performance of a show about all that is sex when you're a teenager which gets a massive reaction from the audience. It is dealing with subject matter which moves the students and they show it. It's a great piece of educational theatre with the emphasis on entertainment and on patronising no one: lots of these students will already have endured situations the performers know nothing about - that's the case in the UK, but it's so much more certain here. And there is another show about the lives of an old couple, a mask show, so different, and great.
Over lunch we are approached by students and teachers and we sit and eat with the other creatives who are here to work with and speak to the students. In fact, I have lunch with, amongst others, Sihle Xaba who, I quickly realise, is a very famous man. I could probably have lunch with Meryl Streep or Brad Pitt and not realise I was with someone famous, so utterly rubbish am I. The great thing, though, about being surrounded by students who are fans of his, is that they make it utterly clear how very fabulous he is.
And that evening I start to see why he is so adored: we get to see a screening of the excellent Otelo Burning in which he stars. Set in a township in the turbulent 1980s we follow a group of teenagers through a story that is more than real. The students who surround us are too young to remember the necklacing that took place, or the inter-tribal violence... they don't even remember Pass Books. Martin and I do though. And it's curious, to me, that there I was, a teenager myself, on the other side of the world. And because of my South African family, though maybe I'd've been engaged anyway, I watched avidly the development of many horrors in 1980s South Africa. In some curious ways it feels like my story too. Of course I realise that's ridiculous, that I was a very distant bystander, able to dip in and dip out of the goings on as I slept safe in my bed in a village where there is still no street lighting, (because people don't want it not because there is no electricity). And yet these teenagers know little of this history. Not only does it fall into that Bermuda triangle of just before they were born - too early to be history, too late for them to  know about it - but there is also a desire amongst many young South Africans not to dwell on Apartheid. They are not their parents, they are not the struggle, they are the new South Africa. The danger in this is, of course, that if we do not understand our antecedents we cannot understand ourselves, that we risk making the same mistakes and laying blame in the wrong places.
But that's not to pretend that I think I have the right to judge the way they are being  South Africans, being themselves. I see why the desire just to move on is so strong, and so it is heartening to hear so many questions for Sihle at the end, of all kinds - technical, historial, about his own celebrity life. Some actors are great at playing humility, but I swear this is no act - the man's feet are clearly rooted to South African soil and he remains un-pumped-up by the screaming of teenage girls. And Martin and I, driving away, off to find some supper, yet again, cannot believe how lucky we are. It is as if we have been party to a private conversation in a private home - we have been allowed to sit and look and listen to this on-going debate about who these young folk are, who they will be, and what they do and do not consider important. We've heard responses from artists and seen their work standing there for itself.
And in a country where many people do not have clean water and sanitation we are going home to electric blankets: we are more privileged than I can describe.
*Older

Performing to the most important audience

11 April 2013
I have passed through the euphoria of the successful Bartelt breakfast and beholding the gorgeous teenagers while high as a kite on morning coffee, into the Valley Of Considerable Fear.
At the back of a big auditorium, the crop of swaying teenagers laid out before me, we are watching a dance performance. I am loving it. I am glad I'm not sitting next to Bartelt who, being an ex-dancer and choreographer who worked for a period of time with Pina Bausch, would undoubtedly have an opinion. I mean, he has an opinion about *everything* but he *really* has an opinion about dance.
The inestimable Ingrid Wilde is making a speech, it is she who has brought us here, but it's not only that which makes us like her. She seems to also be a case of utterly great, and she certainly is as she respectfully stamps her authority on this event - and the 15-year-old audience - as it gets under way. She only produces nine regional Schools Festivals for the Grahamstown Foundation, as well as the national festival: whatever.
Very soon I am walking down a side-aisle, smiling at the students, who are wriggling and talking and laughing and not noticing me at all. OH.... this is terrifying. These kids are about to be bored out of their minds by my story of death and misery and grief. It's going to be awkward for every living soul in this room, so awkward that I'm sure even people not in the room are going to feel awkward and have no idea where the feeling is coming from: it'll be viral. The whole of Kwa-Zulu Natal will be in the grips of an Awkward Storm which no living weather specialist will be able to diagnose. This is an occasion for which the current usage and popularity of the word awkward has, indeed, been invented.
These are not unfamiliar feelings and, like childbirth and death itself, the only thing to do is just get on with it regardless of how I'm feeling. Unlike childbirth and death itself, though, the auditorium lights dim and I am blinded by the powerful stage lights. There is nothing left for me but to declare, for the 21st and final time on our South African tour, "A year or so after my sister was killed a friend of hers came to stay with me in London, and we went out, we went out drinking." And we're off.
Now, Bartelt and I think we have written a very funny show, make no mistake. The fact that no audience has yet appreciated all of our jokes is irrelevant - the gags have taken it in turn to be appreciated, which much more classy, obviously. And yet.
It is today that we have finally met our match: *this* audience gets us. They laugh like drains at the refrigerated gag, and so many others, that I keep having to stop for the laughter to die down. Not only is their shock at the content of the show palpable, but it is audible: everything comes out of their mouths and we all have a hoot together, tears together, some truthful journey together. I have done a bit of stand-up and have sampled the smallest of intoxications when a room above a pub full of folk laughs at your jokes, but has nothing on this. This is an 350-teenagers-full auditorium, laughing at our jokes and at my delivery. I go off-script a bit, impro-ing around like I'm not supposed to, but I am feeling the closest to a superstar I'm ever likely to feel and it's absolutely fine by me: this need never stop.
At the end the applause is sustained and touching, and silence for the dedication to our five dead journalists all the more moving, as I feel these powerful creatures of tomorrow, taking in the facts, ruminating on them, realising what I have just said: that today's performance is dedicated to the following people who died like Kate in 2005 on account of their jobs:
Julio Hemando Palacios Sánchez, radio journalist,
Colombia Hussam Sarsam, tv journalist,
Iraq Elmar Huseynov, journalist,
Azerbaijan Ahmed Jabbar Hashim, journalist, Iraq
Marlene Garcia-Esperat, journalist, Philippines
and to their families.
(Please do view the full list of dedications from the entire life of the show.)
I can feel them take in the fact that these people died to get the news out to us all, to them.
In the break which follows Bartelt and I are mobbed by students and teachers, the conversation free-flowing and fun. Some of the children want pictures with me. How easy it would be to mistake this attention for being directed at me. I am incidental, the conduit through which things pass: the work is the thing, the journalists, alive and dead, are the point, these children are what count.
We take ourselves outside for a walk and a wander and take lots of photos of the extraordinary campus under the threatening sky. Alone, Bartelt and I agree the show was wonderful. We are pleased we can now relax and enjoy the rest of what the KZN Schools Festival has to offer us. Oh, there's the small matter of the lecture we're giving tomorrow morning, obviously, but Bartelt doesn't do preparation for that kind of thing - of course he doesn't. He feels the room on the day - of course he does. I get worried and wonder what on earth will happen: of course *I* do. But for now we can just sit back and enjoy the shows.

Making it up as I go along

Early April

Inveterately stylish as I undeniably am, I put on my full stage make-up over breakfast. Two-and-a-half years ago you'd've regularly found me putting it on in the very busy Pleasance Courtyard in Edinburgh, almost certainly in full view of some of my about-to-be-audience members.

I put my make-up on on the bus, the tube and in the pub. I'll put it on in meetings if I'm off to stand behind a table representing an organisation and I'm running between the two. I'll put it on bit-by-bit and frighten people during that phase where a woman removes all her features, smooths them out almost to vanishing, in order to re-apply them in, roughly, the same places as they were before the whole process began.

On the back of a bus once with my mother and my littlest aunt I started applying make-up and they both complained that it's not nice, that it is, basically, rude to apply my make-up in public. I was astonished. It's not like spitting or fishing your underwear out of your arse, it's not even like blowing your nose, surely? It's just a bit of titivation, but without the nail clippings, under-nail scrapings or follicle-loosenings which seem to be all the rage otherwise. Of course, I carried on.

And one of the reasons I carried on was that I want to subvert the strange idea we have of mystique in our culture: that somehow the bits about actually travelling around in a majority-liquid, ageing, oozing, flaking, gas-creating, blood-pumping, amazing body should be, by women, concealed. I like going out looking as I look - a woman of roughly my age with all bits you'd expect in an able-bodied woman, with no make-up on at all. And if I apply make-up I've no desire to pretend I haven't or to conceal how it's done. I mean, in my case it's often done cack-handedly with my fellow passengers running around picking up eyeshadows and rolling mascaras as they fly to all four corners of the carriage: I am not an oasis of womanly secrets which turn me into a full-on lady. In fact, I was taught my current make-up routine by a friend at drama school back in the days when you could still drink to the tube. We both had huge bottles of Budvar, I sat in a Piccadilly Line seat and she straddled me. The then proceeded to do the full make-up on me, explaining what she was up to as she went. It's more than ten years since I last saw her but I, and casting directors/first dates/members of the good British public owe Mariamne a debt of thanks.

Not to wear make-up is, for me, also a test of myself: how vain, how caught up in the male gaze, how fearful am I of how people will relate to me if I simply look as I look? How much ground have I lost today to capitalism's desire to unnerve me, in this instance, about my appearance enough to make me buy buy buy purported solutions? It's not always easy or straight-forward, but I'm buggered if I am going to be shameful about the way I look with no make-up - it's only my face - no one's got to eat off it or anything.

Breakfast is a success all round and we head for the school. 350 souls is the biggest audience I've ever performed the show to and we arrive during a squall of teenagers, milling, yelling, laughing: being wonderfully themselves, being the huge majority, owning the place. And I look at them, and I think why-oh-why-oh-why are they, almost certainly, already cursed with the idea that they should look like anyone or anything but themselves? They are full of life and potential and are fabulous to behold, as a group and as individuals. Bartelt and I find their energy infectious. What a privileged life we are leading, to be about to share our show with these gorgeous creatures of the future. Maybe it's the coffee Bartelt let me have for breakfast, but I cannot help but love them all as they push past me, a rolling boil of excitement, into the theatre building, barely noticing the middle-aged lady and her woolly-hatted companion.