Rob Murray and Gaetan Schmid first started working on physical theatre piece The Dog's Bollocks way back in 2006. "He had this wonderful, crazy idea about this professor who does a mock lecture and we discovered we had a mutual love for the etymology of words.
"He had a pile of paper, a stack of ideas around words and snippets of ideas and that began a long process of editing and trying to give the show a shape, a sort of arc," Murray said about Schmid in a telephonic interview from Grahamstown.
They took the show on the road for three years running, around Cape Town, up to Joburg and to arts festivals around the country "This kind of work is an organic process and you learn from each audience, so you have to be on your toes. "The show grew a lot, we were always tinkering in those first two years," Murray said He is a firm believer in tweaking a show over a period of several months to whip it into shape. "That kind of investment in a show really pays off.
Not only does it become very rich, but the show becomes an income generator. If you can respect that and invest in it, it pays the artist back eventually" Murray referred to Pictures of You (which is five years old) which the company conspiracy of clowns may be reprising later this year for a possible international tour, and of course The Dog's Bollocks that is seven years in the making.
Schmid went on to work on Rumpsteak and Body Language, which had similar kind of character and The Dog's Bollocks has been on the shelf for the past two years. The actor has now dusted it off and tweaked it for a repeat run - taking it to the Kalk Some people are just born with funny bones. Gaetan is one of them Bay Theatre stage this week.
"Because of his experience with Rumpsteak he's probably refined the style a bit, so it would be interesting to see it now, to see how Rumpsteak has influenced it." Murray spent last year as the resident director for Eastern Cape theatre company Ubom! and he's already hard at work for this year's National Arts Festival.
The new play he's working on for Ubom! is Hoss, slang for horse, which is a sort of Wild West play set in the Eastern Cape. He's also working on an independent project with conspiracy of clowns (Kardiovale, Pictures of You, Benchmarks) that will draw on the skills of Andrew Buckland and Lies' de Kock.
Murray worked with the two on True Blue last year and for this next tragi-comedy project they will play father and daughter in search of the estranged mother. "The thing about the way we work, the process generates so much extra stuff," Murray explained about this new show, which was generated by the work the three were doing on True Blue.
He'd experienced something similar while creating The Dog's Bollocks: "I remember Gaetan and I working at the old Cape Town Lab. I'd planned all these rehearsals and character development and then when we started working he just launched into it and I threw out all the ideas and said let's work with this.
I just sat there and watched him play. Some people are born with funny bones. Gaetan is one of r them." In between working with Ubom! and teaching at Rhodes University, Murray is also working on his PhD that draws on the work he's done over the past decade in the visual theatre genre.
While he's busy on the academic side of things he is planning on turning all the research into a textbook or reference workbook that schools and companies can use to tap into South Africa's rich visual theatre genre. The Dog's Bollocks is on at the Kalk Bay Theatre from April 21 to 27.
Caption: MASTERS OF MIRTH: Rob Murray (left) first started working on physical theatre back in 2006, says the writer.
PICTURES: SUPPLIED
Source: CAPE ARGUS