Sylvaine Strike and Andrew Buckland’s collaboration ‘On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco’ produces a festival winner.
This being my first ever time at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, I was very lucky to obtain a ticket for this sold-out production. When I first saw the title, I almost decided to give it a miss, thinking it was going to be an anti-smoking lecture so I’m glad I took heed of a friend’s recommendation.
Starring festival stalwart and 1986 Standard Bank Young Artist Winner, Professor Andrew Buckland (senior lecturer at Rhodes University Drama department) and directed by the acclaimed 2006 Standard Bank Young Artist Winner, Sylvaine Strike, this beautifully written script by William Harding is based on a short monologue of the same name by Anton Chekhov, but has here been embellished and adapted with references to the poetry of Andre Breton, Edward Lear and Henry W Longfellow and novelists such as Franz Kafka, James Joyce and Laurence Stern.
The play is not really about tobacco or its supposed harmful effects; it’s really a journey of discovery about a bitter-sweet relationship with a domineering wife over 37 years of marriage. It starts off as a lecture on tobacco – ‘Tobacco, strictly speaking, is a plant…’ - but then digresses into a kind of stream-of-consciousness exploration of his innermost thoughts. One hears Breton’s poetic surrealism in the various love-hate descriptions of his wife using opposing compound adjectives.
William Harding says he wrote the play for himself and could not envisage how it would be produced for the stage. This is where the talented Sylvaine Strike comes in; she uses the one prop – a lectern – and imaginatively transforms it into a protective shell or a canoe depending on where the husband’s free-flowing thoughts take him. Beginning with the haunting melody of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, a tone of sweet melancholy pervades the theatre. Strike had thought to play Eric Satie but felt that was too sad. As the husband enters and moves towards an old-fashioned megaphone the music gets louder just as if we, the audience were moving closer to it too. Strike also decided to provide a mimed visual image of his wife (Toni Morkel) at the back of the stage allowing us to see into the husband’s mind. False noses were used both to protect the actors and to make the well known personalities unfamiliar to the audience. It’s quite remarkable how something as small as a false nose completely changes the look of the actors.
Andrew Buckland is superb as the hen-pecked husband who longs for escape but still seeks the love of the wife on whom he is financially dependent. With one prop and a number of small gestures he conjures up the painful world of the husband. His trained physical body balances on the canoe with ease as he paddles along to the words of ‘Hiawatha’ imagining an escape through evoking the spirit of the native American Indian.
Sweetly poetic, disturbingly funny; the audience laughs but with a sense of nervous unease. True comedy comes from a point of pain.
This is definitely a play to see and it should be brought to audiences in Johannesburg and elsewhere.
By Sharmini Brookes
Article Source: Artslink