The 33-strong all-black Isango Portobello Theatre Company comes from Cape Town, but not the bit that the hosts of the 2010 World Cup would like you to see. You have to visit Khayelitsha, the township where most of the actors live, if you want to know what went into their remaking of the Chester Mystery Plays. It’s a vast dusty sprawling dump, made of tarpaulin and tin, that somehow houses two million people.
White Capetonians never go near the place. There, only the roads are well built and properly lit — purely so that the armoured vehicles of the apartheid era could get in sharpish in case of trouble. But for all its squalor and impermanence it’s a thronging place of barbers, shops, schools, taxis, takeaway food and shebeens where potent home brew is quaffed.
Khayelitsha is also full of singing, a talent (like mining) that South Africans have in common with the Welsh. There are about a thousand choirs in Cape Town alone, some of them more than 150-strong. This township is where the talent for the company was extracted and auditioned. It is remarkable that the theatrical explosion of sunshine and sorrow, which is what this version of the Mystery Plays aims for, originated there.
My guide was Mark Dornford-May, the artistic director of the company. Its London visit last year — with an award-winning Magic Flute and A Christmas Carol — was highly acclaimed and successful. The Mysteries cycle is a throwback to the first show that the company ever workshopped, and which was seen in Wilton’s Music Hall, East London, in 2002. It’s very personal to Dornford-May because his wife stars in the show and because his father was drama officer for Cheshire and staged the cycle at least seven times in Chester. The young Dornford-May was in each one, working his way up from a little angel to Roman soldier to devil and, eventually, Christ.
Today he is still romantically smitten with these folk plays — which have been radically Africanised — and what he calls “their simple beauty and theatrical unity”. Back at base, the actors call their white director (who looks like a burly blue-eyed Afrikaner) “Boss” with an ironic tease. It helps enormously that he is married to the South African diva Pauline Malefane (they fell in love while making an award-winning local version of Bizet’s opera, called U-Carmen), pictured below right, who grew up in the township.
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This version would have startled Chester’s Chaucerian-age peasants. For a start, there are no white faces. God and Jesus are black and female (Malefane plays both parts) and the script is a babel of tongues including English, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Tswana and Zulu. Instead of the English guilds who first presented these plays, the force behind the scenes is the ANC.
“I was trying to find a story common to all the cultures,” Dornford-May says. “The Mysteries of my youth came up, and although medieval English is beyond most people, 98 per cent of [South Africa] is Christian. It doesn’t matter whether you are black from a rural area or white from a rich area, you have the same grounding. The medieval rhyming couplet is dead easy to learn.”
In a country as patriarchal as South Africa, having a woman play the deity is quite a statement, but Malefane says that being both God and Jesus hasn’t gone to her head: “But if anyone has a problem with God being female — and some do — well, I simply can’t be bothered with them and I no longer even argue.”
Of 35 actors recruited, 30 had never been in a theatre. They nearly all turn up for rehearsals in town via “taxis” — deathtrap buses that leave only when full. The actors’ fridge is crammed with food that is not the kind of Waitrose hoummos dip that you’d find in your average London rehearsal room. Sheepface meat and “walkie talkies” (bowls of chicken feet and heads) are the preferred snacks.
The South African producing this tour is Eric Abraham, a London-based film and theatre producer and a former antiapartheid activist who was exiled from South Africa for many years. He says that he will accept arts subsidy from the South African Government, but only when the townships get electricity and running water. Until that day, the company is a commercial activity that he underwrites.
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The company is extremely political but in a good-natured way. ANC meetings, prayer groups and announcements (some of them tragic and concerning HIV, violence and the persistent car crashes that are the curse of South Africa) are frequent. I asked Luthando Mthi, the actor playing Abraham and Pilate, if he wanted Nelson Mandela to come to see their work. “No way!” he hoots. “I like to know the old man is all right, but I don’t want him hanging round any more than I would my own grandfather!” This healthy irreverence may come in handy in a new satire the company is devising called Oh, What a Lovely Struggle.
Mandisi Dyantyis, the show’s music guru, is fired up about the Mysteries tour and the sound of the show. He explains that Abraham’s clan is not South African but Masai: “The spell of these chants is terrific. Mary, before she has her baby, comes downstage and starts a township chant, and then the angels come with heavenly choral music. When the three kings come it’s very rootsy, with Khosa harmonies. Some people may be in for a shock.”
Isango Portobello is a shot in the arm for the arts scene in Cape Town, where the theatre is pretty staid. There are no black theatre critics, and the Baxter, the city’s premier play venue, is a forbidding redbrick job from the 1970s that looks like a secret police headquarters. The company is due to move into a new home in District Six, central Cape Town, a once-thriving mixed community of colonial buildings that was bulldozed by the apartheid Government and never redeveloped. Only the church buildings were left standing. One of them — which feels a bit like the Almeida, North London — will house a 250-seat theatre, to be completed by Christmas and named after the great South African playwright Athol Fugard, who is writing a play for it. The lighting director of The Mysteries, Mannie Manim, the co-founder of the renowned Market Theatre in Johannesburg, is helping Dornford-May to run the place.
It’s a great leap forward for this company in which, it is reckoned, every actor’s wage supports roughly ten people. “We have fun, but we respect our jobs very, very highly,” Mandisi says. “That’s why no one is ever late for work.”
The Mysteries is at the Garrick, London WC2, September 11 to October 3. See www.themysteries.com