BWW Previews: BroadwayWorld Looks Ahead to the National Arts Festival

The 2013 National Arts Festival begins this week and arts lovers around the country are making what is for some an annual pilgrimage to Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. Running from 27 June - 7 May, the festival features a programme of dance, theatre, performance art, classical music recitals, jazz, art exhibitions, lectures, films, comedy, family theatre, musical theatre, cabarets and contemporary music, offering something for everyone who makes their way to the so-called "City of Saints". Many of the shows playing the Festival have had runs elsewhere in the country. Here are just eight of those, all of which have been featured here on BroadwayWorld South Africa over the past year.

AN AUDIENCE WITH PIETER-DIRK EISH! starts with Pieter-Dirk Uys establishing a friendly rapport with the audience, setting up something of a "greatest hits" evening where the audience is chooses the line-up for the show, which features some of Uys's best loved characters and impersonations, linked by his own sharp philosophical insights into life in contemporary South Africa. If you are lucky, you might be able to to choose one of the 15 skits represented by a number of boxes lined up on stage at the start of the show. Because of this approach, the grouping of skits that each audience sees is unique. You might spend some time with the beloved Evita Bezuidenhout looking through some top secret files apparently discarded by the African National Congress, revisit the full range of South African prime ministers or encounter the deliciously politically incorrect Noelle Fine, a white Jewish liberal who says the most awfully inappropriate things. Read more about the show in BroadwayWorld's review of last year's run, here.

Memory, identity, history and emotion are the cornerstones of BIKO'S QUEST, the production from Jazzart Dance Theatre that draws its inspiration from "The Quest for True Humanity," an exhibition at the Steve Biko Foundation, which portrays Biko's life and death and offers a space to reflect upon the relevance of his philosophies 35 years after his murder at the hands of the security police during the apartheid era in South Africa. Although it is sometimes difficult to make people feel something when it comes to history, it can be an even greater challenge to make people feel that history is relevant today. Distance via time offers what some might call perspective, making it easier to look at the past with a cool detachment when a vital engagement is what is required. BIKO'S QUEST faces these challenges head on: it is an emotive and engrossing piece of dance theatre, brilliantly serving Biko's vision of South Africa's journey towards a more human face. Read more about the show in our review of last year's production, which can be found here.

Mike van Graan's BROTHERS IN BLOOD is returning to Grahamstown after winning a Standard Bank Ovation Award at the festival last year. Van Graan, a self-styled cultural activist who nurtures a vision of the arts as a socio-political weapon, is this year's Festival Playwright and also has three other plays running alongside BROTHERS IN BLOOD. Tackling issues like cultural and religious differences, xenophobia, crime and terrorism, BROTHERS IN BLOOD certainly aims to be provocative theatre and - for the most part - it succeeds. As a piece of writing, BROTHERS IN BLOOD lives up to the reputation it has earned for itself, with a great deal to take away from the play about our lives in this country, about our conditioned responses to one another and about acknowledging the power of asking ourselves what we would do in circumstances such as these. Read the full BroadwayWorld review of BROTHERS IN BLOOD here.

CHAMP, by Louis Viljoen, debuted last year during Artscape's Spring Drama Season and subsequently played a season at The Fugard Theatre. An outrageous comedy that pulls no punches, Viljoen won the Fleur du Cap Award for Best New Script and, in the hands of director Greg Karvallas, this production had audiences rolling in the aisles in Cape Town. CHAMP deals with the experiences of three struggling actors who are playing the three bears in the children's holiday entertainment programme of a large shopping centre. With the end of the job in sight, it seems that Melvyn, Elliot and Stanley will make it through, albeit with their dignity in tatters and their sanity in threads. But then a little terror named Rodney decides to cause trouble for the trio who decide to exact their revenge. CHAMP offers audiences a voyeuristic kick as its protagonists respond to their grimy day-to-day reality with a raw conviction that society has (perhaps wisely) taught us to suppress. Our full review of CHAMP is available here.

Follow Spot Productions has presented two editions of FACE THE MUSIC and it is the kind of show that can continually be recreated for new audiences to enjoy. After all, South Africans love a good music game show. With nearly 40 seasons on television under its belt, NOOT VIR NOOT can attest to that. FACE THE MUSIC brought the idea to the theatre in a different format that allows the entire audience to take part in the quiz, winning an Ovation Award at the National Arts Festival last year. This edition sees Tarryn Steyn taking over one of the show's tracks from Vanessa Harris (who will be seen in ASH AND VAN EXPOSED at the festival this year), with Delray Burns and Margaux Fouché, who were featured in the version reviewed by BroadwayWorld last year, returning for more effusive fun in this entertaining franchise.

MINNIE AND JOHNSON was one of my favourite cabaret shows of the summer season in Cape Town last year. That 90-minute show, which played only seven performances at the Kalk Bay Theatre, has been pared down to a swift 75-minute piece for the festival, which sadly means that the audience is able to spend less time with the inimitable Emile Minnie and Godfrey Johnson, whose brilliant performances drive this show. While both are witty, Minnie's persona is chatty and intimate, while Johnson's is tragicomically clown-like and introspective. Both have the ability to have the audience doubling up with laughter in one number and on the brink of tears in the next. Whether you have seen them before, either alone or together, this is a show that will lift your spirits and banish your bad day or chilly festival blues. Read more about last year's edition of the show here.

SPECIAL THANKS TO GUESTS FROM AFAR has the unenviable task of being Nicholas Spagnoletti's sophomore play, following the enormously successful and brilliant LONDON ROAD. While vastly different to its predecessor in its setting, characters and narrative, SPECIAL THANKS TO GUESTS FROM AFAR also explores (as did LONDON ROAD) that ever-important human desire to connect and the multiple layers of difficulties within which that yearning are wrapped. Vividly brought to life by director Matthew Wild and the company of actors consisting of Chi Mhende, Gideon Lombard and Nicholas Dallas in its original run as part of the 8th Artscape Spring Drama Season in 2012, which was reviewed in full by BroadwayWorld here, the play seemed to capitulate to the law of diminishing returns when it played an encore season in Cape Town earlier this year. Hopefully, the play will find its footing once more during its run at the festival.

Directed by Tara Notcutt and featuring Rob van Vuuren, James Cairns and Albert Pretorius, THE THREE LITTLE PIGS is no fairy tale. A thrilling political satire with a few stylistic nods to RESERVOIR DOGS, THE WIRE and THE SOPRANOS, the play is an allegory à la ANIMAL FARM, using recent incidents from South African politics as a target. It is a completely absorbing piece of theatre, grabbing audience members' attention as soon as they enter the auditorium, with the actors inhabiting a stage space surrounded by barbed wire fences and fitted out with cold, clinical furniture. This is the kind of play where one can not only enjoy the fantastic performances from the cast, the witty banter that penetrates the writing and the physical comedy with which the actors imbue the characters, but also recognise the state of South Africa's national integrity and be challenged to take action against this state of affairs. BroadwayWorld's full review of THE THREE LITTLE PIGS can be read here.

Sponsored by Standard Bank, the Province of the Eastern Cape, the National Lottery, the National Arts Council of South Africa and the Department of Arts and Culture, with City Press and MNET representing the media, this year's National Arts Festival seems as though it will be of a high standard, with many intriguing productions playing both the main stages as well as the fringe. Further information about all productions playing at the festival can be found at the National Arts Festival website. Tickets for all productions can be purchased at Computicket. See you there!

Photo credits: JAZZART, Jesse Kramer, Dani-Bischoff.

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