Yael Farber, the adventurous South African-Jewish director, tells Deirdre Mulrooney about her verison of the Bard's classic at the Belfast Festival at Queen's
'Sezar is dead!" Over the blaring PA, newsflashes from CNN and Radio France plunge us deep into the dramatic treachery of a "hopeless continent". Bobbing entrails are raised aloft, artificial limbs pile up with glistening bodies. Ululations, hypnotic African and techno, trance sounds filter through a smoke-filled stage. I sense magic.
Below, in the darkened auditorium, a solitary silhouette darts about like a mad conductor umbilically connected to the on-stage spectacle. Yup, it's Yael Farber - the tiny 31-year-old Johannesburg director who, with her riveting cast of eight, created this mammoth beast of a production.
Gob-smacked, I am stuck to my seat well after Brutas has disembowelled himself. There is no respite just because the dress-rehearsal is over. With the first public performance of SeZar's UK tour happening in a few hours time, the momentum continues in the foyer in a torrent of notes between Farber and Tish Frances, director of the Oxford Playhouse.
In a blind act of faith, Frances hand-picked SeZar for her theatre in Spring 2001. This seemingly impetuous decision was made on the foot of Farber's A Woman in Waiting, the autobiographical play starring South African jazz singer Thembi Mtshali, which won an Edinburgh Fringe First in 2000.
The discovery of "unbelievable affinities" between the volatile world of Julius Caesar and post-Apartheid South Africa, "a country in a fledgling democracy and the possibility of one highly charismatic person coming along and subverting what people gave their lives to fight for", catapulted Farber into undertaking this, her first Shakespeare production. It is also the first "ready-made" text she has done since her award-winning production of Shopping and F***ing in 1998.
Interestingly, the story of Julius Caesar is "almost identical" to the Shaka Zulu story, she explains. "Shaka - a totally extraordinary charismatic leader - was the king of the Zulus, and he was murdered by those closest to him".
Typically, Farber found autobiographical points of entry with her cast: "they are representing a truth for themselves about living in a new and a hard won democracy".
The takeover begins with the title. "In South Africa, things are spelt phonetically, it's more an oral tradition than a written one. Somehow by changing the title we earn the text". Hence, SeZar.
As far as spoken language goes, about 40 pr cent of Farber's site-specific adaptation remains in English. The rest is either taken from Sol Plaatje's Se Tswana translation of Julius Caesar, or is claimed into performers' own respective African tongues - Xhosa, Zulu, Pedi, and contemporary township lingo.
"In Zulu and Se Tswana they use deep idioms, which contemporary English doesn't anymore," explains Farber. "So switching from Elizabethan English in the iambic pentameter to one of the vernacular languages was one of the most natural transgressions to make." Brazenly, she declares: "By replacing Rome with the fictional African state Azania we have destroyed the iambic pentameter. I respect it, but I didn't feel I had to honour it to please some concept. I just wanted to get to the truth of the language." Paradoxically, this noisy production nonetheless seems saturated with all the rhythm that characterises iambic pentameter at its best.
Shakespeare's world, as Peter Brook demonstrated in his 1991 production of The Tempest (which featured Sotigue Kouyate, a Griot from Burkina Faso, as Prospero), is virtually a contemporary African one, where the visible and the invisible, the living and the dead co-exist. Somehow, Farber has persuaded her cast to infuse this rich and intimate tribal spirituality into SeZar: "I asked the individual cast members to respond from a spiritual place. I guess I choose to work with people who are willing to bring that. I'm not going to be particularly fascinated by working with people who don't."
Hope Sprinter Sekgobela, aka Sezar, also a praise poet, electrifies the show by channelling his own "praisings" and ritual dance into his compelling portrayal of the epileptic SeZar.
Equally, Siyabonga Twala, from Kwa-Zulu Natal choreographed breathtaking sections of the production that morph into war-dance in response to Farber asking him how he personally would respond to the situation that these Shakespearean warriors find themselves in.
"I choose very particular kinds of performers who I feel can go there. I'm very based in getting to the truth of a dramatic moment" she explains. "For me the emotion is the wheel to the machine."
Twala also portrays a Sangoma (a traditional South African healer) reading the innards of a beast slaughtered for an indication as to whether Sezar should go to the Senate on the day he is assassinated. Far-fetched? Well, considering more than 80 per cent of South Africans go to a Sangoma at least three times a year, Sangomas are probably as common there as GPs are here.
Many of the cast are famous soap-stars in South Africa - they had to be escorted out of Johannesburg's Market Theatre recently to avoid being mobbed by fans after the show.
FARBER'S idiom, with its unobtrusive nods to "the virus" and to "necklacing" is of South Africa. "I live in Johannesburg, and I want to be part of telling stories that we all grew up in. It does come down to why are you born in a particular place and time? And what purpose are you supposed to serve? But it's not some kind of holy mission - I'm a theatre maker and I enjoy telling a good story."
And yet this story-telling is also universal. "You have your Mandelas, who is just the symbol of the millions and millions of people who manage to be human beings to other people regardless of what they represent."
She takes Duma Khumalo, of the Sharpeville Six, "a Primo Levi in a South African context", as a prime example. Their "suffering saturates their humanity instead of saturating their bigotry". He Left Quietly, her most recent creation (coming to The Space @ The Helix in Dublin at the end of November), is based on and stars Khumalo telling his tale of death-row, and beyond. In another genre, her next production, Zarafa, with the Handspring Puppet Theatre is due to première at Washington's Kennedy Centre in June 2003.
Farber's own complex identity probably drives her ultimately life-affirming work. She was raised as a Jew, but "to a Jewish community I'm not Jewish enough, while to a non-Jewish community I'm regarded as Jewish".
Her Afrikaans/Irish mother converted to Judaism upon marriage to her gynaecologist father, a Lithuanian Jew called Shalom. His daughter's theatre company, Arc Productions, is a derivative of Arcadia, the Johannesburg orphanage he grew up in. "As a white South African, one has the feeling of living in a country all your life and not having the right to claim it as your own," she says. Laughing, she sums it up with the aphorism: "being Irish or being Jewish is not a nationality, it's a psychosis". (She knows what she's talking about - she spent 10 months here recently).
But then, with all the intensity of a French actress, and the self-assurance of an African queen, she boasts: "I feel totally privileged to have never totally belonged anywhere". Except in the rehearsal room, that is: "Theatre is where I live and if you put me in a room with actors around a table I feel like I belong. I'm an insider".
The next morning we are in Woodgreen School, Oxfordshire, where Farber answers questions from A-level students on SeZar.
"In any country, or room of people who come from a completely homogenous society, there will be insiders and outsiders because we create those boundaries," she says. "It's up to us to transcend them and to come up with a common human experience."
SeZar is at Stranmillis College Theatre, October 24th-26th, as part of the Belfast Festival at Queen's. The festival runs October 24th-November 2nd. Bookings: 028-90665577/www.belfastfestival.com
