DIANE DE BEER REVIEWS:

THE UGLY NOO NOO

DIRECTOR: Janet Buckland

PERFORMER/WRITER: Andrew Buckland

VENUE: Mannie Manim Theatre at the Market

DATES: Until September 1

Pictures: Ruphin Coudyzer

What a delight to revisit Andrew Buckland’s The Ugly Noo Noo, which was written and performed for the first time in 1988.

That feels like a lifetime ago and it’s not often that we get the chance to revisit these classics of local theatre that travelled the world and won accolades all round.

They cleverly kicked off with The Making Of, presented as part of performance lectures and demonstrations at SO|The Academy for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg with Buckland giving audiences (those who had seen it before and those going for the first time) insight into the development of his signature style. For him, the play was a response to the political and social context of apartheid South Africa in the late 1980s. For the audience, the talk was a chance to get closer to the thinking and strategies of this astonishing South African theatre maker.

Athena Mazarakis, Momenteur for SO | The Academy for the Less Good Idea, explains that The Ugly Noo Noo is a seminal work in the canon of South African theatre.  

“The work is not only a biting piece of allegorical protest theatre but it also established Buckland’s unique style of the highly physical one-hander that blended elements of mime with razor-sharp text.

“It is a style that has since influenced and inspired multiple generations of performers and theatre makers, defining a particular South African brand of physical theatre marked by the combination of physical virtuosity with a strong textual strand and the solo performer who single-handedly takes on an entire cast of characters.”

She reminded audiences that, “not only is this re-staging a reminder of the part that theatre and artists played in the struggle but is also a continued reminder to artists today of the power that their work holds to critique and question the many injustices that surround us.”

For Buckland, his work is all about the imagination of the audience, where the action of the piece is given life. “It’s a delicate line to get the audience curious, like charades on steroids, as you draw them into the play.”

Play, in fact, says Buckland, was where it all began. He was the youngest of seven siblings and started playing on his own for hours, being the hero in his own world.

For this particular piece, 36 years ago, it began after witnessing his wife’s response to what had become known as the Parktown prawn. “I always loved language put together with movement or stillness,”  he says.

Thus began the encounter between a human and an insect. He felt trapped in the world of apartheid at the time. How does a white man deal with what is happening around him on stage? He knew he had to participate in a meaningful way. The Ugly Noo Noo gave him the perfect allegorical way out, offering him a novel way of telling stories while at the same time pointing to the world around him and the horror confronting South Africans.

What he was familiar with was his own angst and fear. Being the artist he is, The Ugly Noo Noo was where it all began. And while we were in the grips of apartheid when it first emerged, this time the world is struggling with a sudden explosion of fascism all over the place, and the timing of the current season could not have been more apt.

Looking back, that has been Buckland’s weapon (deliberately or simply instinctively). His work has managed to capture a particular zeitgeist which in some fashion seems to hold countries  to ransom.

What he discovered with this work was that it was possible to use laughter as a vehicle to invite people to acknowledge and confront their fear.

Watching the performance all these decades later and again hearing the text it is obvious why it was such a success while still retaining all the power of performance and  storytelling as when it was first performed.

When talking about the making of, Buckland referred to his age, but what struck me was that all his many years of training, of honing his craft, have added to the detail and impact of his movement, which might have been diminished with age. Older and wiser, he knows where and how to compensate and embellish.

The text has lost none of its initial cunning and while his antics on stage has the audience in laughter much of the time, the real essence of the text is a still a stomach punch.

It is one of those that has all the elements celebrating the art of performance and storytelling when there’s a true genius at work. Buckland has always been one who worked with delicacy and delight when presenting his art. And his choice and timing of when and what to perform is spot on.

Hopefully he will return to that classic treasure trove of his and bring back all those memorable gems.