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Bogeyman of the bush or hilarious folk hero?
KOOS SAS
TricycleTheatre
BEFORE getting bogged down in details, it should be stated straight away that this play is very good. The performances are bewitching, the songs heartfelt.
I would not hesitate to recommend seeing it at least once.
The story – though some might say it lacks nuance – is sufficiently thought-provoking to make this more than a mere visceral pleasure, however.
While addressing serious historical themes by way of sentimental music has been done before, the unsubtle irony of having a white eugenicist operatically sing “the cheekbones are quite typical, the forehead’s rather small” while examining the scull of a black “savage” still makes for a pleasingly unsettling juxtaposition.
The savage is Koos Sas, notorious sheep rustler and bogeyman of the South African bush. Sas was shot dead in 1922 after being accused of murdering a white settler and his scull was placed in a museum.
David Kramer, the highly regarded Cape Town musician and “cultural agitator”, resolved to tell the tale of this bushman bandit through the bandit’s own eyes after seeing this grisly museum piece.
In Koos Sas he asks: Was Sas really a murdererous thief, or are such descriptions more germane to the white settlers who declared African lands their own and enslaved their native inhabitants?
At his trial, before being thrown in jail (from which he escaped), Sas, we are told, “didn’t even defend himself, just spoke a lot of nonsense about mountains”, waxing lyrical about nature in the style of some Native American proverb about how we cannot eat money.
If this sounds like a typical Tricycle polemic, don’t worry. Press reports from Sas’s time, despite their overt racism, contained a dash of awe at how this clownish outlaw evaded the cops’ grasp time and again – and at the same time as making a political point, this play contains all the excitement of a cowboys and Indians tale.
Koos Sas runs rings around Karoo Moose, the other offering in the Tricycle’s South Africa season, which was frankly tedious.
Among the many entertaining performances here, Jody Abrahams should be especially praised for his hilariously frenetic portrayal of Hendrik Skilpad (pictured top left) , Kas’s somewhat unhinged nephew.
My only criticism relates to the arrangement of seats in the auditorium.
Koos Sas is mostly in Afrikaans with English subtitles (on screens above and to the side of the stage).
An audience member seated at the side of the stage informed me that her view of the screen above it was obscured and so she had to keep turning her head from the stage to one of the side-screens, which must have been annoying.
So remember to ask for an unobstructed view of the stage and the screen above when booking tickets.
Until August 1
020 7328 1000 |
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