Contrasting plays highlight the power of intimacy over ballsiness

• Flaws and brilliance on display in two offerings about gay men at Johannesburg's Market Theatre

Big and brash, or small and intimate? Seven men strutting around letting it all hang out, or one man looking so broken that he’s the one who touches your heart?

I’m speaking theatrically, with Johannesburg’s Market Theatre staging two shows that share several similarities but are enormously different.

On the main stage is Love! Valour! Compassion!, which won its author, Terrence McNally, a Tony Award for the best play of 1995. Watching a play about the lives of gay men as Aids ravages their community ought to be an emotional experience. But from a seat in the balcony I felt sadly detached, looking down on a show that needs you to look right into it and be drawn into its story. Moving to side seats didn’t help, because the scenery is a collection of large blocks that the cast shifts around in a design that’s supposed to encourage you to picture the setting yourself. They’re called blocks for a reason, however, since they often obscure the view.

The larger underlying problem dawned slowly. This felt like watching actors act, rather than inhabit and invest in their characters completely. Each seemed to play their part in isolation, delivering their lines to each other or giving a commentary to the audience as islands rather than a unified whole. With no palpable sense of love between the lovers or chemistry between the friends the play becomes wordy where it should be intense, and lacklustre where it should sparkle.

Other niggles abound. In one scene the recorded noise of traffic dulls the words, and music muffles some of the concluding moments. Then there’s the accents, with the events set at a mansion outside New York. As the British character James, played by James van Helsdingen, said: “I seldom know what any Americans are talking about.” That applies perfectly to the over-fast delivery, which leaves SA ears struggling to catch the words.

There’s plenty of male nudity, particularly from Boris Petrenko as Ramon, a Latino lover. But the scenes where he preens in isolation serve to highlight the disconnection between the characters.

In theory, this should be a funny, acerbic and profound journey as the men laugh, love and insult each other while two of them grow ever sicker. Some express guilt and confusion over why Aids leaves some untouched while others die, and put it down to sheer luck. Yet the lack of poignancy left my mind wandering and thinking similar thoughts about Covid. The play, directed by Gregg Pettigrew for Lefra Productions, is billed as a tribute to McNally, who was an early casualty of Covid. Sadly, the result doesn’t do the idea justice.

MORE FULFILLING

A far stronger, more relevant and fulfilling production is taking place quietly upstairs. The main character in Nine Lives is also gay, with Warren Masemola playing Ishmael, a Zimbabwean refugee seeking asylum in England.

The contrast between the shows is vast, with bare emotions easily surpassing bare men. Masemola is one of SA’s finest actors, and he pulls you into the story so well that you want to petition the UK’s home affairs department to let him stay.

The one-man play has him acting nine characters around a slum that he shares with another asylum seeker. It’s written by Zimbabwean-born poet Zodwa Nyoni, who grew up in Leeds when her father won a scholarship to study there. Masemola’s attempt at a Leeds accent is hopeless, but I only know that because I grew up there myself. Other audience members will just assume that people talk funny in this inhospitable city.

The story, however, is far from funny, exposing the appalling treatment meted out to asylum seekers. They teach immigration officials not to be human, Nyoni writes, and break your spirit so you give up before they tell you to go. Her script highlights the uncertainty, the poverty and crushing daily indignities, while the hostile locals accuse them of sponging off the system.

Masemola is such a powerful actor that it’ sa pleasure to watch him even when he’s breaking your heart. When he cries, your own eyes glisten too. Yet it’s not all gloomy despair, with lighter moments when he gets to show his versatility.

Nine Lives is tightly directed by Diamond Mokoape and the props are minimal, with a bare stage and a suitcase, but you don’t need more. Soft background music adds atmosphere, and excellent lighting by Josias Mashiane plays on Masemola’s distraught features to great effect. People look past you or look through you, he says, and those who see you only see the labels — like gay, immigrant, foreigner and all the more savage epithets.

It lasts for less than an hour and cries out to be expanded. To end where it does feels cruel, leaving us needing to know what will happen to this man we’ve come to care about.

Nine Lives runs at the Market Theatre until December 12, tickets from Webtickets. Love! Valour! Compassion! runs until December 12 then moves to Artscape in Cape Town in February. Tickets from .LTickets.co.za