The rise and rise of actor and theatre-maker Wessel Pretorius
Actor, playwright, screenwriter and theatre director Wessel Pretorius has been strangely anxious about his trip to Europe to perform the role of Mephisto in Faustus in Africa!, an expensive revival and reworking of the 1995 production featuring live actors, charcoal animations and astonishing puppetry. Helmed by directors William Kentridge and Lara Foot, featuring a top-notch cast and exacting production values, it’s an astonishing theatrical event, polished and professional, with significant international financial backing. Which is why it’s currently abroad for a six-week tour.
Expectations for Faustus in Africa! are huge, yet it’s not the show, nor the thought of getting lost in foreign cities, nor even the physical labour of theatre move-ins, performing in new spaces and various connecting trips between venues in different cities that have had Pretorius in a knot.
Rather, there’ve been pangs of FOMO. This is the first of three such European tours scheduled for the year, and his biggest worry is that he’ll be missing several of the arts festivals that have been his bread and butter for over a decade.
“When we heard that Faustus is travelling overseas, I was on the one hand so grateful, but on the other hand, I was sad that I won’t be able to do the Vrystaat Arts Festival, or go to Aardklop. These festivals are very much our lifeblood, something I’ve been doing for the last 12 years and they’re the only thing I know. I’ve performed in school halls more than I’ve performed in actual theatres. It’s pretty rare to have an actual dressing room.
“At one recent festival, I directed two shows, performed in another, and had one 20-minute show that was playing in a tent. It was like everything, everywhere, all at once. Some of these shows are fortunate enough to get to go to the next festival and then the next festival. The festivals have become a substitute for the old state-run performing arts councils. Instead of working for a repertory company, today’s theatre-makers have this dynamic festival circuit.”
Not that South African festival-goers will entirely miss out on Pretorius’s creative endeavours while he’s out of the country. On the programme at this year’s National Arts Festival at the end of June is Die een wat bly (the one who stays), which Pretorius directed and wrote alongside the cast.
With it, Pretorius has navigated into new genre territory. While his plays have always tended to be physical, and often comically so, this is his first time working with dancers, and his first time creating a “play” that might just as credibly be called a dance show, or physical theatre.
The show was initiated by Figure of 8 Dance Theatre and originated from an idea the company’s principals, Grant van Ster and Shaun Oelf, had of telling a kind of streams-of-consciousness story about their own mothers – about mothers whose sons are gay.
“They wanted to create a play with a strong dance element and they wanted to tell the story about their mothers and about being the queer son… and the relationship queers sons have with their mothers,” says Pretorius. “This is something I find endlessly fascinating and something think about a lot in my own life.”
Starring Oelf, Van Ster and actor Daneel Van Der Walt, it’s in many ways an homage to childhood, those memories that are filtered by the passage of time and by the thoughts that interfere with the way in which memories are formed. Watching it is like slipping into a dream; when I saw it at Suidoosterfees, I was buoyed, invigorated, heartbroken, and genuinely carried away. The closest I’ve come to describing how it made me feel is to say that it was like being inside a René Magritte painting, a surreal universe where memory, dreams and the subconscious slip, slide and sometimes collide with reality.
It has the effect, too, of leaving you suspended in an altered state.
It’s powerful stuff. The sort that makes you feel far more than it encourages you to think. While the poetry of the words washed through me, the play’s resonance was felt in my gut, not in my mind. For 75 minutes, I was witness to a living dream: very beautiful, very powerfully executed.
It was a strong reminder of theatre’s potency, its potential to transport us.
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