An Epilogue to the Theatre Posters Index

I’d been on a conveyor-belt for so long, churning out more and more work, yet due to the tiny size of the theatre market in South Africa, relatively speaking - it required a yearly ‘re-invention’ of oneself.

Over and over again, come up with something original, and of suitable quality to dazzle the critics, and pull in the crowds. And when that's accomplished, do it all again. And again. And..

There were and are no laurels in South Africa, on which you can rest. You're only as good as the last six months or so of output shows you to be.

It must be wonderful to create a work, and then tour comfortably with it for months on end. However, the SA market doesn't allow for that sort of comfort.
I'm aware that my work is 'kind of' a niche market. It's not strictly mainstream. While some of my plays could have Granny and Grandpa and the kids brought to them, many couldn't. And I wasn’t doing the farce route, I didn’t want to dumb down what I was doing, just to stay being 'well known' or whatever the hell I was supposed to be.

I mean, for instance...

Those days, and for a number of years, I was utterly conflicted at the Grahamstown festival, signing autographs for the public, who seemed to approach me like I was a rock star. This would have been fabulous if I could deal with it, and was actively seeking it for my ego - but I wasn't. The increasing public visibility just weirded me out. Gave me even more internal demons than the ones I already fought with, and which, I suppose, helped provide the fuel for my creative output.

In some ways I'm still the shy fat kid with a bad stutter, who can't get the words out properly, and who's eaten up in permanent frustration, and desperate to communicate and be understood. I'm still wrestling with that layer of issues. Let's not even get into the more advanced concept, of the idea of 'wanting to be liked'. That requires a clearer sense of Self than I'm capable of, it seems. I'm kind of aware that intrinsically, I perceive myself as inherently unlikable. (So what that says about my past perception and behavior towards those who in fact do like me, is yet another bristling bundle of issues).

 Welcome to being barefoot on a hard, thorny, stony road.

I know that the shy fat stuttering kid part of me has been overcome and done away with - but years of being unable to speak normally, during my formative years, I guess, have done some curious damage.
So saying I was 'conflicted' is putting it mildly.

Internally, I was increasingly more alienated, the more the public adulation increased - both within myself, as well as from a large portion of the orthodox theatre community, who eyed me with a variety of emotions. As to how much was valid, how much was petty, and how much was genuinely due to my own thoughtless blundering, I have no idea.

Bear in mind I hadn’t finished high school, and unlike most of the drama and arts community, I didn’t study anything, in order to be producing and creating work. I just 'decided to do what I wanted to do'. That's all. No grandiose Plan - just a burning desire to create stuff and share it with others, and then create more and repeat the process.

I didn’t respect much of anything. (I still don't). Therefore, I suppose, I could trample on toes, in ways the more conformist and repressed, could only dream of.
Looking back, I remember more about my loneliness, and sense of utter isolation, than I do about the supposed trappings and benefits of ‘being famous’.

I think it was Bono of U2 ( back in the days when he was actually cool) who said ‘Celebrity is a Business’. When you’re a big fish in a small pond, it’s even more overt, just how much of a ‘business’ it is. (Assuming you're that kind of a self-analytical person to begin with, and confront yourself with these questions, at all).

Matters came to a head at my last Grahamstown Festival, I think it was 1995. (Things are blurry in my memory, for a variety of reasons which I may or may not decide to get into on these pages).
The final show had been done, I’d been paid.

I stood, very consciously aware of myself, looking down at the pile of bank notes in my hand. I remember very clearly thinking to myself
 ‘I - have had no fun at all, doing this. It was just ‘work’. And here’s the supposed reward for it’.
A little pile of money.

But I’d had no fun, got no satisfaction, apart from doing the job correctly and pleasing the audiences. I felt frozen and cold inside. This wasn't 'a job well done'. It was whoredom. I felt unclean in some way, the months of hard work and rehearsal leading up to performance, a gross face-down crawl and slide through a degrading soiled valley of some unknown material.

It was the first time I'd ever done anything creative 'just for the money'.
The wad of banknotes stared up at me.
And I very deliberately and consciously told myself: “I’m not doing this again”.

 It’s lovely that other people over the years, have seemed to find what I’ve made, of worth to them. But I'm wildly selfish. I make work to please myself and to explore the worlds and stories that otherwise, will only exist in my mind.

I write them out, and then move on. I’ve just been lucky, I think, that other people have managed to find a use and a meaning in my creative work, that seems to be of use for them. And lucky, I think, that what I’ve written, manages to communicate to audiences.

I remember standing in the darkness of the auditorium, watching the CAPAB production of ‘Blitzbreeker’ and hearing the audience laugh and respond as the story unfolded. My eyes watched, my mind observed the lines being said, and the responsive happy audience as they laughed and reacted - but I remember the taste of the coffee I'd picked up in the foyer, more than anything else.

My play is unfolding. And I am sipping coffee. Hmm. The coffee's not bad.
In that moment, I puzzled over why I felt so unconnected to it all. Why I seemed to lack a connection to the moment, to what was occurring, noisily all around me.
On stage, Jonathan Pienaar and Willy Fritz were working their asses off, going through the unfolding story. The delight visible (to me, at least) of actors having a great time with a script. And me? I sip the coffee, mulling over this odd absence of 'belonging'. Yes I wrote it, and here's a lavish and brilliantly executed production, made by the late great Norman Coombes. A noisy and happy audience, clearly having a great time.

What does this mean, I wondered.
The disconnect increased afterwards, as audience came up to me and I had to do the autographs thing, and thank them for their compliments. I felt like I always did - like an alien masquerading as a human being - and the object of the current exercise, is to fit in, and make the person talking to me, feel good when they step away from me. It's all very clinical, and conscious. Just because I feel nothing, is no reason to be mean or hurtful at the public who genuinely think I'm enriched by their compliments. So it's an acting job for me, to receive compliments.
(Perhaps 'real' actors, are well-adjusted structurally speaking, to be able to assimilate positive comments into their ego's, when they happen - but for me, that's never worked, unfortunately). I'm not made like that.

I later worked it out, just what was going on, and why I felt so ‘uninvolved’ from the immediate theatre happening - it was because I had already experienced it, months earlier, when I wrote the piece.

What they were experiencing now, I had experienced alone, while writing - that’s when I’d done my chortling, laughing, and happy enjoyment. I’d made something, and thoroughly enjoyed it while it decided to be written down by me. That was when I truly experienced the play. Anything after that, was just duplication of an original moment that I'd absorbed, relished, and moved on from.

Yeah I know. Isolation. And yeah, I know - it's indulgent. And yeah I know, I'm trudging on that road by choice.
This oddness of a lack of a connection to my staged plays, kept on happening - I think it was only with ‘Sleeping Chickens’ - where I sat and laughed from start to finish, no matter how many times I saw it. Because it was just so damn funny. Apart from that, my theatre, I think, exists between my ears, in the quiet during writing. Actual ‘performance’ is almost a secondary thing to me, that's incidental, an accidental byproduct of my own selfish and happy story-creation urges.

But back to that final Grahamstown Arts festival, standing alone in the Great Hall, a wad of money in my hand.

The money gets wedged and hidden from my mind, into my pocket. Pleasantries get exchanged with the various happy vendors, who'd been selling food in the foyer for the duration of the Festival. I watch the coffee urn being carried out, the trestle tables being dissembled. More banalities. The deconstruction of a brief makeshift theatre venue occurs before me. Outside, the world keeps on turning.

I left before all the various banners and posters began to be torn down.

I did one more theatre piece eventually, called ‘A Talk in the Park’. It got trashed by critics, and with hindsight, perhaps deservedly so. My heart wasn’t in it, anymore. I didn’t know what I did want to do, or where I wanted to be - but I was tired of recreating myself, and I needed new horizons. New challenges. New stories.

I hit the brakes, and treaded water for many years. By chance I accidentally ended up becoming a ‘voice artist’. I kept my thoughts to myself and embraced this new avenue that reality had put before me. Making consumerist propaganda.

So it was my voice that spread across South Africa anonymously, selling products to the public. The new ‘King Kong’ movie, this coffee, that hotel chain. My voice spread further than I ever did. My gravelly smokers voice stood me in good stead, and I spread across Radio, TV and cinema. The anonymity of the voice over profession, appealed to me. At last, out of the unforgiving eyes, off that stony road, and onto an odd little path, with some shade.

I also became an official 'voice' for the South African Broadcasting Corporation's TV 2 channel. Now I could be heard 24 hours a day, advertising upcoming movies and assorted programs. This just increased the barrage of adverts pouring out from all media, with my voice selling whatever the clients needed.

And I sat in my womblike little room with my aircon unit blowing, fighting off the fierce African heat. I pondered, and idly passed the time, as the years flowed by me.
I didn't write much. I kept away from theatre - I think I needed to contemplate, and try to evaluate the rollercoaster ride thus far, which had brought me to this position of at least material comfort.

And then the Fates rolled their dice again.

Now here I sit, in America. Wide awake, and finally writing again.

The writing has truly begun to increase. This is now August 2007. Thus far this year, let's see. I've written three short films, two full length feature film scripts, four 10 minute plays, two full length monologues. There's also been a number of essays. And I'm aware my output is not nearly as much as it should be. I've been a bit of a slacker at times, this year. I still have a number of stories that are whining inside me, waiting for me to write them out and exorcize them.

I've also had to confront the simple issue of 'what exactly do I want to be communicating to the American public'. I'm a South African, for better or worse. An African (despite the racist pronouncements of the current South African government, who seem to think that only certain races of humans, are entitled to being called that.

I'm an African. I was born in Africa. Therefore: 'African'.

And a lot of my work and attitudes, have been molded from the uneasy hybrid mixture upbringing of British-American-African sensibilities. In the past, my work spoke to others who are also this mixture. Oddly enough, based on the past and upcoming US productions of my work, my stories seem to have an equal 'meaning' to Americans as well.  Schwinggg.

Now what exactly do I want Americans to feel, in reaction to my work? And also, how do I feel exactly, about my own path of being en route to becoming an 'official' American citizen, myself? What are my ethical, political, artistic duties? I've never been about the stupidly simplistic idea of 'getting famous' or 'getting rich'. Materialism and consumerism don't interest me at all. It's always been a mixture of addressing the issues I'm battling with, and I guess, telling stories which illustrate these various conflicts, that I have inside me.

 They all tend to boil down to a blurred internal battlefield of personal angst, and inner-conflict across a wide array of topics,  and issues of social justice.

And as anyone following political current affairs, will know - there are issues aplenty with America.  And here I am, in the midst of the new Global Empire, doing the same old thing -  trying to make sense of myself - as well as the reality I find myself in.

Time will tell what stories emerge, and decide they want to be written, and thereafter, hopefully,  more theatre posters, will be added to this collection.

-Ian Fraser. August. Connecticut. USA.