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Contents

Dedication vii

Foreword ix

Introduction xi

The Plays: Johnny Boskak is Feeling Funny 1

White Men with Weapons 53

Seeing Red 89

The Blue Period of Milton van der Spuy 167

Breasts – a play about men 193

Look Out 223

Happy Natives 243

Greig Coetzee Biography and Fact File 311

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Foreword

I first came across Greig Coetzee at the Klein Karoo Nationale Kunste
Fees in Oudtshoorn in 1995/96. I was presenting Athol Fugard’s Valley
Song at the festival and our venue was plastered with posters for White
Men with Weapons, which was showing elsewhere. I immediately regis-
tered that this young man was someone to be reckoned with in the
New South Africa. His boundless energy (he used to run the Comrades
Marathon annually and never needed a break in the schedule for any
practice, just on the day of the race!) was a joy to any theatre producer,
and it was not long before we were working together. I was arranging
tours for him locally and internationally, and he was writing and perform-
ing and carrying out the many varied tasks of staging and publicising his
work with customary gusto. This was the beginning of a relationship
which has endured to this day.
I find Greig unique in his articulation of his own feelings about the
current situation in South Africa and his take on the apartheid years that
he had to negotiate as a young man growing up in South Africa. Some of
this time was as a conscripted member of the South African Defence
Force. He writes in a range of theatre forms and to date he has not settled
for one writing style but rather uses different ways to deal with different
issues. His work is engaging and incisive and his understated humour
often uses accurate observations of life at this time, in this country, on
this planet.
This publication represents the bulk of Greig’s theatre work to date,
a splendid testimony to his burgeoning talent.

Mannie Mannim
Johannesburg
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Introduction

Johnny Boskak is Feeling Funny (2004) is the second of Coetzee’s plays

to receive the Fringe First Award of the Edinburgh Festival. The first
was White Men with Weapons and, fittingly, Johnny Boskak is the de-
velopment of one of the characters from the earlier play. Coetzee was
interested in exploring what one of these army veterans might be like
twenty years later in a very different South Africa. The name Boskak is
drawn from the Afrikaans slang for ‘shitting outside’ – it literally means
a ‘bush-shit’ (a reference to the ‘boskak’ that was a staple part of army
life, as well as to Johnny being a homeless wanderer). But the name could
also be seen as a distillation of many conscripted ‘troepies’’ experiences
of being in the army, namely ‘bosbefok en afgekak’ (‘bush-crazy’ and
burnt-out). The tone of the play is apocalyptic as Johnny sets out on a
road trip in search of salvation. His dope-induced dream of accounting to
‘the Devil and the Lord’ sets the tone for further encounters with a variety
of vividly realised characters. But ultimately Johnny faces his demons
and finds true love, for a time. A modern version of the quest myth in
which the protagonist has to slay the dragon, Coetzee’s play takes a
mundane life and, through mocking it, ennobles the common or sordid
experience. The mythic tenor is underscored by an extraordinary text in
rhyming couplets, made up of a mixture of English, Afrikaans, South
African Indian slang and Zulu – a real ‘Durban’ concoction as vivid and
evocative and unforgettable as a really hot ‘bunny chow’. Coetzee plays
with rhyme and rhythm in a startling and unique fashion, not quite
rhyming couplet (the rhymes are too varied and complex for the
predictability of the couplet) and not quite rap (the language is too
cleverly and adroitly organised). Coetzee considers this play ‘a piece of
theatre to hold its own against rock music’. With a driving rhythm,
combined with projected urban landscapes, a live musical accompani-
ment and a sophisticated playfulness, this is certainly a play that
challenges theatrical form. Difficult to categorise, this tribute to popular
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urban and film culture combines Coetzee’s love of wordplay with his
sense of place. Distinctively South African, and yet strongly influenced
by popular American culture, the play is in Coetzee’s words ‘a road-
movie for the stage’. Using elements of physical theatre combined with a
strong rap beat, the clever rhyming and insistent rhythm sweep the
audience through a headlong journey to inevitable catastrophe. Providing
a virtuoso performance for the solo actor, the script suggests both
musical and visual accompaniment to provide atmosphere and a sense of
the degraded urban landscape and nightscape through which the hunted
characters flounder. Part praise-poet, part Homeric storyteller, Johnny
Boskak has transformed monologue into poetic ode as he pours out his
epic experience of love, betrayal and loss.
White Men with Weapons has been a significant play in the devel-
opment of South African theatre. It was the first play written by Greig
Coetzee to launch his career as a professional writer and performer. The
play was initially performed (1996) at a time when South African
audiences were weary of Protest Theatre and it suggested a way forward
from this genre both in terms of subject matter and form. The experience
of white males living under apartheid, and particularly the experience of
conscription, had hardly been dealt with during a period when the
struggle for black enfranchisement was clearly more urgent and im-
portant. Junction Avenue Theatre Company’s Fantastical History of a
Useless Man (1976) and Anthony Akerman’s Somewhere on the Border
(1986) had previously engaged with similar issues, but at a significantly
earlier time. The subject matter of this play acknowledges that there are
many South African stories to tell. The form of the play – a series of
monologues from a variety of different characters – was unusual. While,
in fact, it was a resourceful response to the financial hazards of staging
theatre in South Africa – one actor/writer/stage manager makes for an
economical and transportable production – it also showcased Coetzee’s
skills as a writer/performer in its instantaneous and effective transitions
through a number of complex and believable characters, all commenting
from different perspectives on a common experience. It provided Coetzee
with a form he was to work with, develop and transform in some of his
later plays. It also introduced a very distinctive voice to South African
theatre, an erudite, poetic and yet satiric style which allows audiences to
laugh at their own absurdities and wince in recognition of Coetzee’s
sharp analysis of South African realities.
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White Men with Weapons has won numerous awards, both national
and international, and thus has played a role in maintaining international
interest in South African Theatre beyond the apartheid period. The
international interest in this first play of Coetzee’s also led directly to the
commissioning of his play Happy Natives by a British production com-
pany. Awards for White Men with Weapons were won for the writing, the
acting and the production – an unusually holistic excellence.
It is Coetzee’s multiple immersions in the process of theatre-making
that has ensured the success of his plays, springing as they do from a
thorough understanding and skilful use of the major elements of theatre:
action, characterisation, language and metaphor. In terms of style
Coetzee’s plays show a continuous growth in the complexity of writing
and performance, while maintaining Coetzee’s belief that character-
isation is the basis of theatre. In his earliest work, Tales from a Termite
(1995) (not included here), he uses a storytelling mode, with the
traditional simple ‘indication’, through performance, of the characters
involved in the story. Both I spy blue sky (1997) (not included here) and
The Blue Period of Milton van der Spuy (1997) examine the circum-
stances and attitudes of one complex character, whereas White Men with
Weapons and Breasts – a play about men (2000) present numerous
characters, each delivering a revelatory monologue directly to the
audience. This monologue-based style is distinctive of this phase of
Coetzee’s work, partly because of the success of these latter two plays.
The juxtaposition of different characters lends a humorous and ironic
touch as different attitudes to the predominant theme are played out. This
humour has made these plays particularly popular with audiences, and
the form has been recognised by other aspirant theatre-makers as
eminently usable, particularly for political satire. I spy blue sky and
Milton are more poignant, focussing in depth in each case on one
troubled, even dysfunctional, character. These four plays all explore a
slightly different use of the monologue form: White Men with Weapons
outlines different responses and attitudes to a common experience; I spy
blue sky includes songs as an integral part of the writing and explores a
reminiscence of childhood and growing up; The Blue Period of Milton
van der Spuy uses monologue to gradually uncover the truth of a
character and situation; and Breasts – a play about men uses monologue
to explore a variety of very different characters and responses to a single
theme.
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The Blue Period of Milton van der Spuy is a personal favourite of

Coetzee’s and a play that has yet to achieve the recognition it deserves.
Its focus is dual, dealing as it does with the protagonist’s attempt to
understand life through the prism of his own mental limitations and the
internalised views of his over-protective mother, and his attempt to come
to terms emotionally with the trauma of his sister’s death. This dual inner
action provides the play with a complexity of implication and with an
oscillation between feeling and understanding that has a profoundly
poignant effect. Coetzee’s fascination with the ambiguity of language is
very evident here. The play also marks a growth in his use of visual
symbolism on stage. The props in this play are multiple and cluttered
compared to their sparse use in White Men and Breasts, creating a
concrete representation of the fertile and yet disordered mind of the
protagonist and his chaotic feelings. Despite the character of Milton van
der Spuy being quite clearly ‘differently abled’, his difficulties with
understanding the meaning of life and its relationship to creativity and
ingenuity, and his difficulties in coming to terms with overwhelming
feelings, are a common experience. Milton’s limitations and paralysis,
his evasions and intellectualisations, are our own.
While Coetzee had developed his monologue style in Milton to the
extent that it was capable of sustaining one character through the length
of a play, he chose to return to the multiple character form for Breasts –
a play about men. The monologue form has the advantage of creating a
complicity between performer and audience: it is an intimate form in
which the audience becomes the confidant of each character, experi-
encing not only what the character wishes to share with the audience but
also intruding easily into private thoughts. The monologue obscures the
distinction between openly shared communication and the character’s
inner world. It becomes unclear exactly when the listeners move inside
the character’s head and when they are distanced. This movement of
focus creates a direct empathy with the characters, which in this play
allows Coetzee to move beyond the macho public persona to explore the
vulnerabilities, longings and regrets of the variety of men presented. At
the same time Coetzee’s acknowledged satiric humour is in full force in
his representation of the mono-dimensional obsessions of the male
species and the sizeable void existing between the sexes.
Seeing Red (2001), Coetzee’s first dialogue-based play, with five
characters interacting in a student digs, originated from the writer’s own
 xv

experience as an anti-apartheid activist on the Pietermaritzburg campus

of the University of Natal (now University of KwaZulu-Natal) during the
1980s. Seeing Red is Coetzee’s first ‘big’ or conventional play, requiring
five actors, and in its first production included a striking set suggesting
the Victorian dignity of the decaying building the characters live in, as
well as filmed projections which evoked both theme and period, and a
sound track appropriate to the time. Seeing Red not only comments on
the most intransigent years of apartheid, but also vividly captures a
particular period and place, and that time in young people’s lives when
they discover the heady joys of independence and the hard choices of
adulthood. Its hindsight involves a glimpse of lost youth and innocence,
lost idealism and purpose, lost people (Tony the Transvestite Tramp, to
mention only one) and damaged lives, but it also touches on individual
hopes and opportunities, the possibilities for a better life and a more
compassionate and just society. This play is a formidable development in
Coetzee’s work, revealing his mastery of the complexity of the conven-
tional theatre script. Despite the seriousness of the themes that the play
deals with, Coetzee’s sure satirical touch ensures that it is also very
funny. Once again the characterisation is complex and believable as
personalities rub up against each other and reveal the intricacy of human
relationships.
Look Out (2001) was written during a residency at the Drama
Studies department, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. Coetzee was
specifically asked to write a play to be performed by five women. He
worked with the performers using creative-writing exercises which he
had found useful previously when writing for commission. From these
writings and from many discursive discussions he created five characters
who inhabit the same metaphoric space. Coetzee did not feel that there
was sufficient time to write a dialogue-based play and therefore chose to
experiment with the monologue form. He had used a form of interwoven
monologues for the final scene of Seeing Red during which individual
characters spoke their thoughts directly to the audience, but were heard
in juxtaposition to the ideas, feelings and experiences of the other
characters. In Look Out he decided to experiment further with this form
and created a multi-layered mosaic of imagery and theme. Look Out also
provided the opportunity for Coetzee to further his experience of writing
female characters and concerns. The five characters who finally emerged
were, as described by Coetzee in the publicity for the play, ‘a mother with
xvi

a dark secret, a woman looking for colour in a grey marriage, a schoolgirl

discovering her sexuality, a recluse trying to deal with a poisoned world,
and a woman trying to cope with losing a breast’. Common to these
characters is Coetzee’s interest in exploring both their vulnerability and
their toughness. This play breaks new ground in its experimentation with
form, as characters are seen in relation to one another but in a different
way to the traditional interaction of dialogue. Here the characters don’t
speak to each other, but interrelate in such a way that attention is drawn
to parallels and differences of personality, life experience and emotional
response, thus creating a sense of the richness, diversity and variety of
human experience. This form also emphasises the poetic nature of
Coetzee’s writing, its linguistic echoes, the use of imagery and metaphor.
Happy Natives (2002) is a triumphant confirmation of Coetzee’s
ability to comment satirically and powerfully on South African society.
The play is gripping and funny, and yet keeps surprising the audience
with its insight into the complexities of cross-cultural relationships ten
years on from the start of the rainbow nation. As always with Coetzee’s
writing the story is grounded in character – people one can immediately
recognise and enjoy. Using techniques honed in his earlier work Coetzee
uses the theatre’s ability to involve the audiences’ imagination, by
showing scenes with three and four characters played by two actors. This
playing with images of transformation adds an assurance to Coetzee’s
use of the theatrical medium. Happy Natives purposefully delights in the
actors’ skill in metamorphosis, and in the theatre’s ability to make the
audience believe without necessarily actually seeing. This metaphor, of
the shifting state of reality, is also expressed through the satiric subject
matter. Attitudes towards each other are shown to mutate and transform
as characters gain more insight into the actual feelings and beliefs held by
individuals from ‘other’ racial groups. The play shows how little we still
know each other, and how South Africans still make assumptions about
each other based on racial grouping rather than on individual reality. This
is rich material for comedy and Coetzee excels in using such theatrical
techniques as the reversal of expectation, and the revelation of the
unexpected and the contradictory.
Happy Natives is about the process of making a theatrical image of
South African identity. Coetzee brilliantly contrasts this manufactured
image with the reality of the daily lives of the characters. Whereas the
image is slick, exciting, sanitised and simplistic, the reality is shown to be
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surprising, unpredictable, complex, difficult and depressing, and yet shot

through with attempts at real connection which gives it meaning and
value. The Western capitalist hard sell of the commercial world is
contrasted with the dignity of self-sufficiency epitomised in the final
image of the squatter camp covered in pumpkins. Through using the
metaphor of image making, Coetzee also comments on the position and
use of theatre, its decline from being a means of reclaiming history,
articulating protest and exploring reality to becoming a mindless adjunct
in the process of selling images in order to make money.
Cleverly, this play proves itself to be the opposite of that com-
mercialism, and of immense worth in its commentary on our values and
behaviour. Coetzee comments on attitudes towards the future, on the
place of tradition, affirmative action, crime, poverty and other contem-
porary concerns. He places most emphasis on the importance of seeing
each other for who we really are. Under apartheid South Africans had a
simplistic, reductionist and yet clear-cut way in which to understand each
other and to pre-judge people. In our present situation each encounter is a
process of discovery.
Coetzee’s plays present a view of the South African experience that
combines an appreciation of the poignancy of ordinary lives with a
sharply ironic analysis of the self-deceptions with which we shield
ourselves. Grounded in acutely observed characterisation, these plays
also display a rich fascination with language and with theatricality.
Through his use of colloquial speech Coetzee not only captures a strong
sense of individual character but, significantly, he is able to create a sense
of poetic depth through the very inarticulateness of everyday expression.
This gives his characters dignity and serves to delineate the tragic aspects
of the comedy of our existence. Structure and particularly patterning are
also important in these plays, as is the creation of theatrical metaphor,
which finds its most effective presentation in the performance space.

Hazel Barnes
March 2009