Treading the boards: Part One

Over the next four or five weeks I’m going to be writing about my experience of doing theatre, as an actor and as a producer. The point of this is not to indulge in autobiography, but to try to give some idea of what doing theatre is like especially when things go wrong.

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I hope the string of personal anecdotes that follows doesn’t seem self-indulgent and narcissistic; the point is to try to give a view from the inside of what it’s like to make theatre. The title I’ve chosen is an old British phrase for acting (“boards” referring to the wooden floorboards of the stage).

Readers who remember my days at the NUL may be surprised that I’m a theatre person, as I did very little theatre in all the time I was there. The reason for this is that for over 20 years, from 1988, the university had on its staff a whole series of super-talented trained theatre professionals (which I’m not; I’m an amateur): Zakes Mda, Katt Lissard, Masitha Hoeane, Katherine Kendall, Patrick Ebewo, and then a number of younger, up-and-coming staff including Selloane Mokuku, Rethabile Malibo and Litšeo Masemene.

They were so imaginative and productive, there wasn’t much for me to do, so I got on with other things. I was the administrator for our international Institute for Theatre for Development, but that’s a different kind of thing, which I may write about at a later date. Apart from that, I produced one short play, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s ‘The Wheel,’ a satirical comedy about the way corruption is passed down from the more powerful to the less advantaged.

I did one bit of acting at Masitha Hoeane’s request, taking the off-stage role (with a mike) of a radio football commentator in his play Cry of the Whistle. When I asked Masitha why he wanted me to do this, he simply replied “it’s the voice!” I also helped out as an assistant producer, for example, when Katt Lissard produced Suzan Lori-Parks’s wonderful Venus. Most of all, I organised or led a team organising visits by foreign theatre companies.

There’s a story here, which still makes me squirm with embarrassment. After one show, a colleague came up to me and said: “Chris, you always invite His Majesty to these productions and he is always happy to come” (he was talking about your present monarch, King Letsie III, who is also, of course, Chancellor of the university).

“There’s just one thing,” my colleague continued. “Why is it always a play about killing a king?” I protested, pointing out that His Majesty had attended Venus and one of our Variety Nights and……. at which point my colleague interrupted: “What about Macbeth? And King Baabu? And now it’s bloody Hamlet.” Oh dear, oh dear.

Mention of Variety Nights jogs my memory. There was one other theatrical event I contributed to, every year. Katherine Kendall introduced the idea of doing an annual Variety Night—a programme of short theatre sketches and songs, with some (but not much) guidance from staff, so really an opportunity for students to showcase their talents.

For the first of these shows, though, Katherine and I decided we’d do a sketch ourselves and we put together a dramatized version of the song “There’s a hole in my bucket.”I played Henry and Katherine played Liza. The students hugely enjoyed seeing two senior academics behaving like buffoons, especially at the climax, when Liza (Katherine) emptied a large bowl of very runny cake-mixture over Henry’s (my) head. It was a little difficult taking a bow to applause while still covered in gloop.

For another of these evenings I organised students in a selection of dramatised poems about the horrors of apartheid. One of these poems was set in a prison and involved a prisoner catching a cockroach and eating it, to supplement his rations. We actually procured a live cockroach, which the student had to chase, catch, and pretend to eat.

All this worked very well and the audience were suitably horrified. I can’t remember the student actor’s name (he was brilliant), but must apologise once more for putting him through the cockroach ordeal (though maybe as he caught the bug, he also caught the acting bug and went on to have a career in the theatre). And in any case, of course, my apologies to the cockroach.

To be continued

Chris Dunton is a former Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at the National University of Lesotho.

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