(Left: Ashley Dowds)
Paul Slabolepszy is ever so brilliant at weaving a story that is rooted in place and time and is nimbly able to transcend its geography and era - to find a universal home (Review by Shannon Kenny)
The Return of Elvis Du Pisanie recently seen at the Seabrooke Theatre @DHS.
Paul Slabolepszy is ever so brilliant at weaving a story that is rooted in place and time and is nimbly able to transcend its geography and era - to find a universal home. And he does so hilariously, poignantly, unapologetically. Slabolepszy is a great South African storyteller and playwright. And The Return of Elvis Du Pisanie is a great South African play.
In this incarnation of the one-hander, Slabolepszy directs Ashley Dowds in the title role - one first performed to much acclaim, by the playwright in the early 1990s. This production stays true to its original staging: a solitary lamppost, a slightly-raised pavement, stenciled with Union Crescent, a pack of beers at the post’s base. Lighting design, in the skilled and artful hands of the eminent Michael Taylor-Broderick, perfectly complements the action and mood. Slabolepszy and Dowds achieve the layering and world-building of a story full of light and shade, to great effect.
Dowds’ Eddie is compelling, riveting. Eddie has recently lost his job in sales and his will to live. It is on Union Crescent - with his thoughts about living and dying; questions about his past, present and purpose - that we meet him looking slightly dishevelled in his dark suit, collared shirt, slip-on shoes. In a moment of crisis some moments before, he has reached for the radio and is catapulted by an Elvis song to a life-defining moment in his childhood, 30 years prior, at that very spot on Union Crescent, opposite The Carlton bioscope. Elvis sightings and dreams, music and lyrics, play no small part in Eddie’s life.
The audience journeys with Eddie and the characters who populate his world, through a childhood and adolescence marked with the magic of the movies; annoying relatives and eccentric neighbours; relocation from the Modderfontein to Witbank; the joy of music, infatuation, triumphs, disappointments and incalculable grief - the very many things that indelibly define and alter one’s life.
Dowds masterfully embodies each character in voice and movement - Young Eddie; Nigel; gauche Uncle Albert; Mum; Dad; Dick Tracy; Lydia Swanepoel; Oom Carel; ol’ Joseph from the Cape, Elvis competition MC - breathing life into them, inviting us to allow them and all their messiness, a seat in our consciousness. We are so invested in each character that of course we cannot help but be genuinely convulsed with laughter when Borisssss achieves what he is set out to do. And how could we not be convinced that Eddie’s Elvis is the clear winner with All Shook Up.
While never shy of nostalgia, the story bears nary a hint of triteness. Slabolepszy is a master at carrying South Africa’s complexity in his storytelling - a wicks bubblegum well past its chewed-by date; the curfew siren that equally terrifies, on opposite sides of the dam, the black mine workers and Mrs du Pisanie a post-war transplant to South Africa from the north of England; Mr Moosa of ‘the corner Greek;’ Oom Carel and Joseph’s relationship; Dad’s trauma response mirroring events in South Africa of the early 1990s.
The Return of Elvis du Pisanie - a story of love and loss, of displacement and home; and healing - still mesmerises, delights and gut-punches its way well into the 21st century, with Ashley Dowds as Eddie “Elvis” Du Pisanie. Kudos! – Shannon Kenny
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