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20/1/2000

'MONUMENTAL' & 'MAGICAL' THEATRE 'ACHIEVEMENT' for Cape Town's Nico

Nico Theatre, Cape Town

Basson's acclaimed staging of Breytenbach's Johnny Cockroach comes to the Cape for 10 performances only.

IF the country's top theatre critics - not to mention the audiences who packed out the hall at Grahamstown this July at the 25th arts festival - are to believed, Capetonians and local visitors are in for an enthralling theatrical treat in January.

In a remarkable logistical achievement, master director Marthinus Basson's acclaimed staging of Breyten Breytenbach's new play The Life and Times of Johnny Cockroach will be staged at the Nico Theatre for ten performances only, from January 21 to 29. With a large cast of well-known actors, live music, magical choreography and spectacular setting, the production is a controversial certainty - it frankly won't be ignored as it gets people talking. It's not to be missed.

Critics at Grahamstown described Johnny Cockroach - subtitled as 'A Lament For Our Times' - as a "monumental achievement in South African theatre and culture", "challenging", and providing "memorable moments for the non-conformists". The debate raged on, the play described as being "as physical as it is cerebral". Most people were simply moved by the strong visual and highly dramatic presentation - a play for thinkers and ravers.

A top line-up of South African performers comes together for this unique collaboration between the celebrated poet and award-winning director with their new play of actors, singers, musicians, spirits and gods.

Sensational Sibongile Mngoma leads the proceedings as the invisible voice, while Dawid Minnaar and Aletta Bezuidenhout play the key roles of the singing Boer and Anna. Others in the line up are Lanon Prigge and Samantha Pienaar as the ever-present male and female Johnny Cockroach, Zoliswa Kawe, Beatrice Joubert, Riana Alfreds, Samson Khumalo, Anton Smuts, Charlton George, Chris Vorster, Sarel Bok and Jaco Bouwer. The musical director is Tom van der Schueren.

Also described as "a Mortality Play", the grand-scale story relates how, one more time, before the curtain descends on this millennium, the dreamers and the revolutionaries get a chance to justify and reflect upon their actions.
This century has witnessed the rise and demise of several major ideologies - fascism, Nazism, Marxism and national independence. There have been upheavals and catastrophes, wars and civil wars and liberation wars and revolutions, mass movements and mass exterminations. Also cinema and space travel and genetic engineering. Sects have committed mass suicide to rendezvous with extra-terrestrials waiting in the shadow of a meteor.

Breytenbach sets the scene: "The whole world is our stage, we are all the actors of our lives and our mortality, and the substance of our shadow movements is the froth of history and the madness of dreaming".

Booking for The Life and Times of Johnny Cockroach is at Computicket. 221299MM

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