Some weeks ago I watched a performance that has stuck in my mind ever since. It was no great shakes, merely a play reading, but director Lynn Maree and the actors brought some passion and skill to make it a quite memorable afternoon.

The play, Cry Havoc, was somewhat flawed too, the stage was small, and they all had only a few hours of rehearsal the day before. But it worked so well, for me at least, because it was so relevant, taking one right into the centre of the riot of emotions behind North Africa’s Arab Spring.

Playwright Tom Coash set the play in Cairo some time before the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak. But the tale of two young lovers, one of whom gets horribly tortured by the police ostensibly because he had been blacklisted for producing an audacious cartoon, goes straight to the grounds for the uprising.

The plot takes some unlikely turns, but what one gets is a fascinating exploration of the motivations for rebellion, even if it is of the more dubious religious fanatical sort. I left feeling I had a beter insight in what was going on in Egypt.

Which revived an old question in my mind: what has happened to our own political theatre? The country is in tumult, rebellion is rife, the whole subcontinent is in flux, yet our South African theatre, despite its glorious protest past, is the last source one would go to for enlightenment, let alone inspiration.

Take a look at the programme for the main festival at Grahamstown this year.

It is not uninteresting and uninviting, not at all, but is there anything that is really relevant to our times?

More relevant than anything on TV, for which you don’t have to move from your couch?

A great deal of the problem, of course, is the dismal funding regime for theatre in our country. It is the same story as elsewhere, another symptom of the ANC government’s failure, in much a similar way: most of the pittance set aside for the arts are used for the wages of incompetent, unproductive and arrogant cadre deployees stuck in postapartheid government mausoleums.

Because there is so little money, getting your play produced is a matter of luck and connections, and hoping you don’t step on some ideologue’s toes by trying to do something stupid like speaking truth to power.

The broader argument seems to be that the country is impoverished, its people unemployed and that theatre is a luxury we can dispense with. This is hogwash; a properly run theatrical industry generates niche jobs and skills to generate more jobs, and is an essential cog in the wheel of the real money-spinner, the movie industry.

Travel in Africa, the real Africa, not the hotel route one, and you’ll soon see that some sort of dramatic activity, is as essential to the most technologically backward communities as a brimming food market.

The problem has another, crucial dimension, the lack of vision and the spirit of conformity that is so insiduous in key parts of the industry. It is a matter of some complexity, but the hit show Songs of Migration is a good example of what I mean.

I enjoyed the show tremendously, when it was first produced at the Market Theatre, and Hugh Masekela was a treat, as ever. So I am not arguing it should have been done in any other way, its success and popularity speak for itself.

But I remember very well going to see the show with some expectation. The poster depicted a man from apparently contemporary times with a suitcase, the lone traveller type, so I assumed the “migration” of the title referred to  the many people streaming to our cities from outside SA. This was not so long after the xenophobic riots, which is a turning point in our history.

The show is carried by the wonderful collection of songs, and the verve with which they are presented.   But it should really have been called “Songs of Apartheid”. “Migration” was chosen to give it a broader background – as if apartheid is not broad enough – and allow the inclusion of a few “white” tokenist songs such as “Yiddische Mama” and “My Sarie Marais”.

This was either meant to put a New SA multiculturalist veneer on the narrative or throw more light on the roots of apartheid. In the first case this would clash with the anti-European sentiments in several songs. In the second case it would ignore the fact that initially migration to white areas in SA was voluntary, driven by the desire to experience modernity.

In the end the text is a rather thoughtless regurgitation of ANC civil religion. It is not that it is untruthful, but it reinforces the downside of all propaganda, a severance from reality. It risks becoming part of the ruling elite’s great denialist project, especially of the great migrations of our time.

There is much disillusionment and dissension in SA that need focusing and expression in more profound ways than Opeds in the print media. We need to return to the days when our theatre plunged into the real world without merely replicating issues on the stage. The audiences will return too.

(Declaration of interest: in one of his other lives the author is a playwright, whose latest play, The Good Candidate, on African township elections, was turned down by the Market Theatre for reasons not supplied).

Tags: #Cry Havoc, #Grahamstown festival, #political theatre, #Theatre