KOOS SAS To 1 August.
London.
KOOS SAS: LAST BUSHMAN OF MONTAGU
by David Kramer.
Tricycle Theatre To 1 August 2009.
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Sat 4pm & 29 July 2pm.
Runs 2hr One interval.
TICKETS: 020 7328 1000.
www.tricycle.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 16 July.
Amiable amble through a story from the bush.
They were dying out – the bushmen of South Africa, by the early 20th-century. Their land was taken for new towns named in a different language. And they had two names, one for the bush from which they had fought guerrilla campaigns against the Europeans over two centuries.
Koos Sas was last of the Montagu region bushmen. Stealing the food he lived on, escaping whenever caught, and even in handcuffs able to run alongside a mounted policeman till the horse tired out, Koos hardly saw himself as a thief. He considered the world’s resources as available for all, not those with title deeds.
When he was shot, his skull was displayed in a museum. His captors saw it as a final humiliation. But they had everything about him wrong. He was shot for a murder he didn’t commit; he allowed himself to be killed – the great runner just stood awaiting the bullets. Meanwhile, his friend Hendrik turned a few coins selling supposed bushmen’s bones to an opportunistic Scottish middleman.
Why the capture? There is, of course, a femme to cherchez, and indeed trouver. Life without lovely Lenie isn’t worth having, and Koos’s death is a final affirmation of existence as something bigger than the individual: a part of nature, a part of love.
Though David Kramer’s play with songs (folksy, bright if not utterly memorable) follows Koos’s later life, it doesn’t shape it dramatically. Lenie’s disappearance is historically inevitable, but Koos himself disappears, less necessarily, for some time in the second act. And the action behind the murder of which Koos is accused is perfunctory.
There’s a glumness to the White characters that may be, partly, part of the point; their formal world is less joyous even than the servants that all the Black people, Koos apart, have become. But it seems too like a hesitancy in the performances. Koos himself, self-contained and self-determined, is surrounded by the wily graver-digger (and robber) Hendrik and the sweetly sympathetic Lenie. In the piece’s sole irony, this brother and sister become, in different ways, the point of his life and cause of his death.
Koos Sas: Loukmaan Adams.
Tonie Swanepoel/Dominee Steenkamp: Robert Koen.
Hendrik Skilpad: Jody Abrahams.
Lenie: Natalie Cervati.
Scotty Lennox/Boetatjie Botha: Nicholas Ellenbogen.
Director: David Kramer.
Designer: Illka Louw.
Lighting: Daniel Galloway.
Sound: Graham Muir.
2009-07-17 12:34:13