RED TANGO
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Even when CAE’s productions are less than successful–their completely out-of-control version of Dario Fo’s Archangels Don’t Play Pinball and their ponderous and confounding production of Heiner Muller’s Volokolamsk Highway–they are never artistic failures. There is always something–some image, some scene–that remains embedded in the brain long after the play ends. For example, the moment in Volokolamsk Highway in which a party bureaucrat goes raving mad as she circles a committee table while shouting increasingly incoherent orders.
Of course, no production begun in the spirit of pushing the limits of theater or exploring what can and cannot be brought to the stage can ever really be a failure. The phrase “complete artistic failure” is reserved for meek theaters that set their sights low and still miss. Besides, it does no one any good to fault a theater for having the courage to see how far a farce can be pushed before the genre’s inherent tendency toward anarchy turns to absolute chaos (Archangels Don’t Play Pinball). Or at what point bombarding the audience with verbal and visual imagery about 50 years of political oppression in East Germany (Volokolamsk Highway) becomes too much.
Excerpts from this speech are woven throughout the play, to underscore moments in the story and to reinforce the parallels between Woyzeck’s oppression as a German peasant soldier in the early 19th century and the oppression of CAE’s black Woyzeck in South Africa today. (“Woyzeck still is shaving his captain, eating his prescribed peas, torturing Marie with the torpor of his love. . . . In Africa he is still on his Way of the Cross into history, time doesn’t work for him anymore.”) The fact that these excerpts are delivered by the only two whites in the cast, from the position of a speaker’s platform towering above the main playing area on the stage, only accentuates the racial and class differences in South Africa.
