THEATRE REVIEW: Pay Back The Curry

PAY BACK THE CURRY

DIRECTOR: Rob van Vuuren

CAST: Daniel Richards

VENUE: Golden Arrow Studio, The Baxter (until Saturday); Kalk Bay Theatre (Aug 30 to Sep 10)

RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)

BY THERESA SMITH

DANIEL Richards is in his own little world, dancing on the darkened stage as the audience enters, a guitar leaning against the wall and a box centre stage the only props. Once the music stops, he steps up and confidently addresses the audience, explaining that he is a time traveller.

At first, he shows us what the future is like when black people are genuinely happy, then he takes us to the past when it is all darkness and pain. Unfortunately, the time travelling machine gets stuck in the present and we see a whole lot of very familiar characters reflected on stage.

Richards slips from one guise to the next, with only the time traveller addressing the crowd – the rest of the people are in their own little worlds and we spy on them auditioning for Idols or hosting TV shows.He even shows us what Jacob Zuma is like is as the president dictates correspondence to Gwede Mantashe. While Richards tackles three roles in that skit (he also pretends to be the letter writer), it is when he plays news show host plus five interviewees that he really displays an impeccable sense of timing and characterisation.

Playwright Mike van Graan’s love of wordplay is most apparently when Richards plays on Thabo Mbeki’s “I Am an African” speech and when he delivers a dark and twisted Shakespeare reading. Director Van Vuuren, though, has put Richards through the wringer, squeezing every bit of physicality out of his actor that he can, and that’s a lot. Richards preens, struts, stumbles, sings and plays guitar as the characters dictate, morphing from one person to the next. The audience giggle, chortle and laugh as Richards homes in on absurd behaviour and thinking.

Not every skit elicits a laugh, though. While the audience is initially primed to giggle when Richards steps up to the podium as a female soccer player accepting an award, the silence is deathly by the time he winds up the thank you speech. It isn’t an uncomfortable cringing silence, more that’s-too-close-to-true-kill-me-now. So, too, the laughter peters out for the guy who was visiting the barber as his opinions did not strike the crowd as outlandish, but true to type.

And therein lies the rub – Richards is playing on stereotypes and the joke lies in him highlighting the strangeness in thought or shining a light on a reality in a different way to make the audience aware that there is something wrong with that reality. Most of the time this makes us laugh, but even the cynic in you has to admit it isn’t funny when the soccer player questions why the word “female” had to be added to her trophy.