Magical flotsam and jetsam

26 January 2013

People are amazing, have I mentioned that?

In the summer of 2012 a South African woman went to a show called The Fear of Breathing at the Finborourgh Theatre . She loved it. She looked through the other work they had put on and noticed Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister. As a sister of hers had died, this piqued her interest. Being, well, being who she is, she found me on twitter and started following me. When she saw the show was coming to her town - Cape Town - she was really pleased to know that she would be able to see it. As well as having a day job, this woman also writes pieces about theatre and reviews shows and so I went to do an interview with her... seven hours later she dropped me off again. We had managed to get the interview in, but we had spent most of the day talking about other things, which is what also happened when Martin had gone to do an interview with her. We had found Tracey.

We have lots of people in our last-night-at-Artscape audience, including Debbie who saw the show in London at the at the Finborough a year ago and has become a friend, and Umashan, who brings a few chums along. They sit in the front row,  I can see their little faces, which are lovely. I recognise one of the women, but I don't know where from. There are also lots of people I don't know, obviously, and their faces are equally delightful, although they fade from site - not like the Cheshire Cat, but up the raked seating and into the profound darkness.

Post-show we wind up at the Piano Bar, owned by one of Umashan's friends, and we are treated to a lovely time. I talk to people I know, to people I'm meeting for the first time. One of them tells me the story of the death of his sister, how it was for her, how it was for him. Later, one of his friends will tell me that they knew him at the time of his sister's death but that he has never really talked about it with them.

The woman I'm sure I know from the front row and I are both convinced that we've met before, but we cannot think where. We waste some time trying to work it out, but to to no avail and move onto more pressing matters, who we are, how we spend our time, how we now Umashan. Stacey and I will spend plenty of time together over the next two months but will never work out from whence (from where?) we know one another. I suspect it's from a previous life, not one where we were both WW1 fighter pilots, but one where we were both employed to weed fields somewhere with very bad weather.

Another audient joins our last-night-at-Artscape drinks, bringing a new friend of his along. Earlier in the week we'd had few post-show beers with him - he's another visitor to Cape Town. Have you heard the one about the Brit, the German, the Dane and the guy from Switzerland talking about the dangers of speaking, and yet not speaking, the same language? It was hilarious, but you probably had to be there.

I am so grateful to the show. It has brought me so many wonderful people who have become great friends, including the obvious icing on the showcake, Martin M. Bartelt himself. There is no awkwardness with people who've seen the show (or who've collaborated with me on it, obviously), they already know about Kate, and they want to spend time with me anyway. Given that I have friends, (of course, actually, they were 'friends') who have no longer wanted to spend time with me because of the effect of Kate's death on me, I am amazed and grateful beyond measure that any one of the extraordinary folk in Switzerland, Edinburgh, all over England on tour, in France, and now here in South Africa want to befriend us. Martin and I are... well, we are human: we are an acquired taste, and yet we have made so many friends on our travels.

Over the next nearly two months I will become indebted to some of these people who look after me while I'm in Cape Town, introducing me to their town, their friends, their ideas and who take me to shows, take me out walking and take me away from myself.

Careful in the darkness

Thursday 24 January 2013
The usher heads for the door, it closes, it opens, the usher comes back in accompanied by... one person, I think. It's quite hard to see from here, but it looks like one. We've always said that we are basically happy for people to come and go, come late, leave if the mood takes them. I often talk to late arrivals, but only in a friendly way, my intention being to put any skitteryness which develops in the audience back in the box. Audiences are easily scared. In an audience we are not sure what is going to happen next, we are emotionally open, we may well be sitting next to someone we don't even know, dammit, so we can be on edge. Compound this by late arrivals who we fear may totally destroy the intimacy we have just developed with our performer(s) and our play... well, it's as welcome as a call from granny when you're getting it on. It's confusing.
And so, when I talk to a latecomer, it's the antithesis of the stand-up's purpose: it's to let them know that I'm not annoyed or put off, just welcoming, open and curious and then the audience can relax too and gently wonder why the hell is the is person so late and feel smug that they go there in time.
So I say to the latecomer on the Thursday at Artscape, something along the lines of her being welcome and to make herself at home, careful getting up the stairs in the dark. And to the surprise of everyone, as happens in this crazy old three-legged-horse-dance we call life, the audient responds: "Oh, yes, I'm late, sorry, but I just had to come, I just could not miss this show. I had to see it," or words to that effect. Obviously I want to expand with pride that someone had wanted to see the show that much: how clever are Bartelt and I that we made a show someone has to see, get us, have you done that? Well then, get on with something equally important, bozo. That's where I want to go, but I have to rein that in. And, well, there is something quite odd about this audient responding to me at all. All anyone has ever said in approaching 90 shows is "sorry" or "thank you", and that sotto voce. I plough on.
Afterwards, downstairs in the foyer, I am approached by a very, very slender woman, probably in her 60s, but well taken care-of, and she starts talking. And she talks. And she talks. This is her, finally the penny drops, the chatty latecomer. She is covered in it, the sticky custard of death, she talks about her son's terrible death, her ex-husbands reaction, years of not getting to the bottom of what happened, that no one will believe them, that you can't get past it, can you, can you, can you? She stands that bit too close to me, unaware, or all too aware, of the other audients around us, not wanting them to share, to hear to talk. I manage to break off the conversation so I'm talking to a woman who knew my sister, who visited by aunt's house with her and sung around their piano. She and I embrace, we talk briefly, she cannot stay but we exchange business cards.
Only when everyone else has gone do I realise that Martin is outside with the woman whose son died, she is standing that bit too close to him, he is engaged fully, and it flows out of her, endlessly. It has been decades, he was killed in a lift, murder, she says, though never proven. Watching her now, not in the full glare of her agony - she is focused on Martin - I look at her, see her pain, at her struggle for the truth, to have it come out. She knows it will not, somewhere in there I know she knows it, but she cannot help but struggle against the inevitable. It is too far away, forgotten by so many, of importance to nearly no one, just to her, to her son's father whom she says has not recovered - he was a journalist, you know, her ex-husband, the murder planned by the wife of the son, he was blown up.....
Agonisingly, after more than half an hour, we have to shake her off. She would go on forever and we cannot help. Usually the show makes me feel like we have made contact and made something change, for the better. But not tonight. Tonight I see the desert of human suffering spread out before me and I am disconsolate. This show is not therapy, I know that, but witnessing this pain makes me fee there has to be something I can do, but there is not. She is alone. I am alone. It makes no odds whether he was murdered or not, it's what she believes and it's a life's work, accepting injustice on this scale. And there is nothing to do but to get on with the work of acceptance.
But I am lucky. We wander though town, Martin, Jacques and I. We find a place for a beer and sit in some silence, that silence of not knowing, together in our various alonenesses.

Swimming is no pursuit for a claustrophobic

We pass a swimming pool one day in central Cape Town and Mark tells me it's meant to be nice.
I am unfit. I am unfit on an unprecedented level, I fear, and in the past I have done quite a lot of swimming. Not as a kid. As a kid I resented the long, sopping hair down my back, always catching it for being late to the next lesson, the indignity and struggle of getting dressed in a rush. It would be years before I found out I need hat, goggles, nose clips and ear plugs to be a genuinely contented and efficient swimmer. Obviously, as is so often the case with things I was forced to do as a kid, I have been grateful in recent years for what Miss Sewell taught me about swimming. Turns out my crawl is not too bad and I've had a bit of help from a coach at a pool I use when I'm working on a particular police training site. He does lifeguard duty and gets bored to smithereens, so if he can find any kind of tutee, he is delighted to pass on technique. I'm slow, my shape is not very aqua-dynamic, I find it boring beyond measure, but I do have spasms of enjoying improving my technique, the spasms forming and integral part of the 'technique'.
I buy a month's pass at the pool, marveling at the price, thinking of what it costs me to go to the Brixton Rec, which I know is by no means the most pricey choice in London. The pool area is magnificent. It is shabbily magnificent, but it is something to behold nonetheless. It has a history, the Long Street Baths, and it has incredibly clean water. I'll do more than a month's worth of swimming in it while I'm here and there will not be a single moment of ear trouble... maybe the earplugs are contingent upon where I am swimming after all.
I also get to pick up tips as this is a nation of swimmers, well, of white simmers, obviously. It is a hearteningly multicultural venue, though, for South Africa and there is often a coach - from the overweight chap in his later years through to the very young woman in shorts, both of them frighteningly sour: they would not have got a stroke out of me. So much of learning in my childhood was shot-through with terror: terror of failure, terror of doing the wrong thing, terror of my teacher. And the state of terror isn't great for learning.... well, it's not for me, anyway. Terror makes me stiff and jumpy and hideously forgetful.
I earwig on the lessons of some of the small people sharing the pool with me and tweak my stroke even more: I'm just an amazing swimmer, really, I am OLYMPIC. I have to keep thinking that because I am just that little bit claustrophobic, and some other word I'm sure, which has to do with being afraid of the deep water being deep and wide and empty and.... watery. How I ever became a Master SCUBA diver is a mystery to me. Well, no, actually it's a key character trait of mine: I'm inclined to do things that terrify me. And swimming basically terrifies me. Putting my face in the not-quite-cold enough water makes me very uneasy indeed, I have to control my breathing and my ignorant fear. Focus on the rewards, Rebecca, even if they seem rather.... hard to comprehend at the moment.
And, as with swimming, so with the creative process, I try to drum into myself as I toil, pointlessly, up and down the pool. I just need to stick at it... and not panic.

The camaraderie of bemusement

Tuesday 22 - Saturday 26 March 2013
There is applause at the end of the first night in Cape Town, and laughter during the show. Then there are cognac cocktails and family members I've not seen for years and one of my interviewers from the radio telling me about his mother's death and hugs and friends and more cocktails and more laughter and tears and friends of Kate's I've never met before introducing themselves and my knowing their names and what they did with Kate - as if I had met them - and more hugs...... it's like any other evening in the bar after a performance of Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister, this opening night at Artscape.... with added cognac cocktails. Did I mention them?
I am, as ever, amazed I have got through the show and delighted that anyone wants to approach me at all, let alone to hug, ask questions, tell me their story, to cry and thank me. In the interests of balance (I know I don't need to be balanced, but I have a small leaning towards it) not everyone approaches me, some just thank me on their way out, others avoid me entirely - as with the rest of life, what Bartelt and I have done here is not for everyone, but the reaction to the show, especially tonight, is rather overwhelming for me, largely due to the high stakes and my uncharacteristically nervous state.
And the week continues in this vein. All of the front of house staff who look after us so well - they and the security guys really are fabulous - come to the show in turn, and each has a story of loss. Not just loss, but violent loss. None of these folk are white, they are all black or coloured and so, by and large, are likely to live in tougher areas where there is always more crime and more violence.
For one, the phone rang and a voice said that her son was dead. She thought it was a crank call and hung up. The voice called back, repeated its preposterous message: which son, she says, she has two - a son and a son-in-law. Her son is dead, says the voice, the police officer. She tells Martin, she tells me her story, the details. I would never have guessed such a gentle, polite, neat woman in her sixties could contain such a story... which is stupid, I know. She wants to tell me that they shot her son in the groin. I pass this detail on because it is in these details that I find we are most alone. The hideous detail alienates the listener, if it is true and not a fabrication, if the person experiencing it is standing right in front of you. And she is very keen to tell me that she has kept his clothes as well. She has an air of bemusement about it, as if she wonders why she has done that, but hearing my story, that I still have Kate's clothes in my flat, she says she can confess to me and we are able to share a moment of camaraderie in our bemusement.
Neither of us has any explanation for so many of the things we have done; we have, to quote Dylan, just kept on keeping on. Sometimes other people without an experience like ours have a very clear idea of exactly what we should and should not be doing, and they tell us. Their ignorance brings the kind of clarity we dream of... which is not to say they are right. They are just lucky to know so much still when we have found we know less and less with each passing day. Why not keep the clothes, make a show, refuse to get out of bed ever again? I can only have the vaguest stab at the reasons for any of it.
And yet, and yet, on that first night these stories had flowed with the cognac cocktails, people in nice outfits, chat about all kinds of things. You just cannot tell how people will react, how  they will express themselves, and you cannot tell from someone's exterior what stories they cradle in their guts.

Just focus on the cognac cocktails: if you can still say it, you've not had enough

And the Cape Town opening is upon me. Inevitably - or almost - the day dawns beautifully bright, hot, sunny. Another gorgeous day in Cape Town. As evening approaches (another warm, gorgeous evening, of course) I realise that I've not seen my dressing room, so when we get to the theatre on the opening night I ask Franky to take me to it. It's past the enormous stage onto which the more bijou Arena theatre backs, down lots of stairs, along a corridor.... past some signs about the under stage passage, and through a locked door for which it takes Franky a while to find the key. My dressing room is enormous and, having got the bottom of how to turn on the lights, he leaves me there.
Being left in this enormous room on my own in the bowels of Artscape is not the best thing for my nerves, which have already had a bit of a twang when we talked past the folk setting up for the After Tears drinks which have been laid on by our sponsors, Bisquit Cognac. Yes, our opening night is being sponsored by a drinks company thanks to Mark, my sister's best friend, the man with whom I am staying and one of the reasons we felt we could do this tour at all. There is an array of cocktails, cognac cocktails! They look blinking marvellous... but they are are not for now... not for me anyway.
Mark suggested the After Tears theme for the party. It's a township, thing, apparently, to have a proper do after a funeral and it's called After Tears. I like the idea. I especially like the idea that one's tears might abate after the funeral. And so he, together with our producer Anna, have organised it all. I'm so used to Martin an me doing everything ourselves, it feels decadent and slightly scary that it's all happening and all I've really done is approve things as we've gone along.
There can often be an inheritance when someone dies, money being the most popular inherited thing, I guess, but also mementos, pets, things you didn't know while the person was alive (for example, that your youngest brother is in fact your nephew) and all kinds of what Nigerians call wahala: trouble. I've inherited lots from my sister, from money to underwear via furniture and wahala. It didn't occur to me that I might inherit people, but I have, and the jewel in the crown of these people has to be Mark. I've known him all my life - he had to sit in the car park when his mother came to visit my mother and the brand new me at the hospital - an experience that scarred him I think, as that is how he explains how he knows me to people.
We got on okay, but there was an edge to our friendship. And it was always mediated through Kate. My sister was many wonderful things but she was a rather jealous person and so I was pretty circumspect about getting too close to any of her friends, and Mark was always very special to her.
Mark, who lives in Cape Town these days, traveled to Johannesburg the day after Kate was killed and got to Mum before Charlie and I did. And I was so grateful that of all the people she was was with, Mark was there, and so quickly. Mum tells entertaining stories about Mark as a little boy. All I'll say here is that he was very talkative, you will have to apply under separate cover for further details.
He and I have a level of friendship which simply did not exist before Kate died and I am delighted and devastated by it: however much I appreciate him and his fella Ikeraam, their kindness, their amazing generosity in general and over this tour, I would give it all back to return to the days when Kate and Mark were best mates and I was just her little sister, steering clear so's not to wind her up.
So we have a big opening gala night tonight, journalists, friends, theatre people, people from consulates, some of the great and the good of Cape Town. I do feel slightly calmer out of my enormo-dressing room and warming up in the space - my space for this week. At the back of the stage, though, there is the door which goes down the fire escape, which leads to the gate, which takes you out of the complex, onto the road and away from all of this. I look at the door, it's inviting evening light gently grinning at me like a benign drug dealer, and I contemplate running away. Not for long, but the thought strikes me that I could.
But it's twenty minutes before showtime and I head down the stairs to meet people, to start the pre-show, and to make that important decision about which cocktail would be the best starting point for me in about an hour and a half.

Seduced by radio

Monday 21 January
How I love radio studios. Don't get me wrong, I love TV studios too, but there is something... timeless about radio studios. They don't get all dressed up for one show only to be stripped down and re-dressed, making like they love the new show as much as they loved the old one, like TV studios do. They are.... more balanced than that. I've done lots of radio interviews for SILLMS. I've sat round tables with famous folk on a chat show, I've squeezed into booths on my own, hundreds of miles away from my interlocutor and I've scrambled round central London during my lunchbreak trying to find a quiet spot to talk on my mobile to an interviewer on the other side of the world.
The safm offices at Sea Point look like radio offices look.... except they're, kind of, opposite the sea. Excitingly, when I arrive, there is a certain amount of confusion about how the furniture has ended up where it is. It seems the chairs, the bench, are in the wrong places... maybe there was a bit of a party here yesterday. When the furniture finally comes to rest I take a seat and watch the producers doing their thing. One of them is trying to get hold of and keep hold of two different interviewees on their mobiles. They are both in remote areas, it would seem, and one of them is going in and out of meetings. In between doing this she is talking to Nancy, the presenter, and giving her readings of the names of her interviewees. Kate was a producer. I enjoy watching them, thinking of her, like, maybe she's doing a similar kind of thing in Joburg right now. She's not really dead..... you can see where this was going.
South Africa, like everywhere, has its own set of characteristics, and one of them is that, with 11 official languages, people are constantly mis-pronouncing each other's names. I have a very bad memory and so I cannot remember very run-of-the-mill UK names, and the harder they are for me to pronounce, the harder they are for me to remember. But I fit in round here with my fervent whispers to companions, "What was his name? With a V? With an F. You really say it like that? You're not winding me up...?"
And people have more than one first name. Staff is my hosts' domestic worker - she's been with them for... at least fifteen years. She got on well with Kate. Before I introduce her to friends, especially ones from the UK, I have to tell them that her name really is Staff, rather than it being the name my unreconstructed racist friends call the woman who comes and magics their home into domestic order. Then, the other day, someone said, but what's her real name, her given name, her Xosa name? Hmmmmmm. Embarrassing for moi: I am a Guardian reader and I'd really messed up here - I had no idea. The next time I had the chance I asked her.
"Staff is my name."
"But your Xosa name."
"My parents only gave me Staff."
"So that's your only first name?"
"No, there's Nolwando too."
"Oh, is that what your parent called you?"
"No, that was my husband's family."
"Oh, so a nickname, then?"
"No, when you get married your husband's family choose a name for you."
"They choose it?"
"Yes."
"Do you get a say?"
"No it is for them to choose."
Blimey. If it's not echoes of colonialism, it's patriarchy living high-on-the-hog. Have I mentioned my problems with weddings? I don't think I have, which is a miracle as I have many of them, the central one being that marriage was invented to pass ownership of a woman from her old owner (father) to her new owner (husband) and yet women still love a wedding. This whole Xosa name thing really does rile me up as with so many traditions in the UK... but it means it'll save me social embarrassment of the champagne socialist kind in the future when I introduce people to Staff.... Nolwando.
I have a most enjoyable interview with Nancy Richards and then I rendezvous for lunch with Team SILLMS in the cafe of a hotel which overlooks Artscape and other buildings, as well as a fabulous sculpture ... even looking down on it Artscape looks enormous. By the time I get there, Zach, the baby, has already been whisked away by the waiting staff: they love him. Everyone loves him. He is very cute and well-behaved, but there is something more to it - people want to touch him all the time, have photos as if he is a celebrity. I think I have Zach to thank, though, that when I need some quiet for an interview with Africa Melane on Cape Talk radio just after lunch, they are willing to turn off the restaurant music for me. By the time I'm done, Team SILLMS have gone back to continue the tech and I sit alone, enjoying the view. And then it's back, hidden somehow from me, but there nonetheless, the gentle thrum of my tension. Like a baby with some noisy foil, I can be distracted easily by interviews, they can make me believe I am interesting - that is how the interviewers react after all because it's their job, and presumably behaving as if I am interesting means I hopefully become more interesting. And yet... there is a very real theatre just over there, challenging me to feel the fear and do the show anyway.

Cockroaches ate the motherboard

21 January 2013

It will be a couple of weeks before we get to the bottom of it all, during which time there will be accusations and recriminations: who has not been cleaning their plates properly? I really don't think I have been here long enough to have contributed to the whole thing. They will come here to try to fix it and then they will come back to take it away, to give it a good going over. And then the news will come: there is nothing anyone can do, nothing anyone has done: cockroaches have eaten the motherboard and there's just no coming back from that.
I find the stress surrounding the untimely demise of the dishwasher, a particularly big problem for Staff who does most of the washing up, a decent distraction from the fact that today we are going to Artscape for the first time to tech the show, to meet Guy with whom we have been communicating for a few months, to sign contracts, to look at bookings for the first time: as co-producer I have been derelict in my duties avoiding this task. I am worried about audience numbers, I am worried that if the audiences are small it will mean that the audiences will be less at their ease and, therefore, not very.... keen on the show. This will make it a long hour and fifteen for them, but at least they can have a doze: it will turn into an eternity for me.
I have a word with myself: I have done this show... I don't know... 80 times, give or take. I can do the show, or at least I can do it to Martin's satisfaction, although I'm never comfortable using the words "Martin" and "satisfaction" in the same sentence. It's my role as co-producer and..... and.... probably being in South Africa, stalked by Kate, by everyone I've been here with who's no longer here or no longer Here, which are disturbing me.
It is a very, very hot day as team SILLMS, together with Mark and Zach in his pushchair, go over to the theatre. Because I am an idiot, despite knowing what a big and important venue Artscape is, I'd not really thought about going there at all. Our theatre space may be on the smaller side, but this place is enormous. In style it's not so very far from the National Theatre in London and as we skirt around, trying to find the stage door, the complex looms over us like a landship. We find Guy in the end and we make our way to the theatre and the strangest thing happens: instead of the frisson of excitement I normally get when I see a fabulous theatre space I'm going to get to play with, my blood runs cold. Maybe it's the rows of plush seats, maybe it's the stack of paperwork we have to start on, but I am rattled. I keep it to myself. Only when I have done all the signing with Guy, while the others mill about or have a feed (the baby) do we look at bookings. And that's it: that's the moment where the tidal wave of anxiety overwhelms me and... the wake of this landship pulls me under.
I stride across the room and tell Martin I need a word.... in private. We go out of the theatre, down the stairs and on the stairs I burst into tears. I think Martin is a bit surprised. Of course I will have to pull myself together again, go back into the theatre, get on with the tech, but for a little while I sob on Martin's shoulder. We agree to get on but to talk about later - it's not long before I have to jump in a cab and head for SAfm to do a radio interview about the show and about Actors for Human Rights - it'll be my second interview for Otherwise - they liked me so much the first time that they asked for more - that fact is going on my CV.
Team SILLMS continue the tech while I head for the studio in a cab, once we've got out of the Artscape car park that is. There is some filming taking place and  I start to worry that I'll be late. You need to build in bumping-into-a-film-unit time whenever you attempt to go somewhere in a car in this town: they are everywhere, looking glamourous, holding up the traffic. And as we head for Seapoint I continue to wonder whether my motherboard has gone, or if it is recoverable.