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Interview with Grethe Fox by the Mail & Guardian, weekly newspaper in South Africa

Die Goue Seun – Theatre work in Afrikaans

Among the new works of Afrikaans drama that opened at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK) in Oudsthoorn in April 2002 was DIE GOUE SEUN (THE GOLDEN BOY) about the much loved poet Uys Krige and explores his work as well as his relationship with his mother, the writer Sannie Uys.

The production won the festival’s highest award for Drama and the the award for the best newcomer went to the young actor Neels van Jaarsveld in the role of Uys Krige. The production has been invited to other major festivals in the country as well as runs in major theatres in Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Johannesburg and the AARDKLOP Festival in Potchefstroom.

Die Goue Seun was directed by acclaimed director Marthinus Basson. For Basson Die Goue Seun was a further investigation into the creation of non-linear dramatic works that originate from an emotional rather than a cerebral impulse which he initially undertook with last year’s much admired Tango del Fuego. The script for the new work has been edited together, by Basson and Saartje Botha, from Krige’s own writings (in a cut and paste process that Basson regards as metaphoric for the writer’s own mercurial life), while Krige’s niece, in the person of the inimitable Grethe Fox, takes the role of Sannie Krige’s mother and her own grandmother.

Krige was according to Basson, a mentor and precursor to the likes of Breyten
Breytenbach, Andre Brink and Ingrid Jonker. Basson regards Krige’s thinking as so far
ahead of its time that his work in the 1930s and 1940s can be seen as
foreshadowing, by almost twenty years, the surrealist-influenced writings of
Die Sestigers group that was composed of giants such as Jonker, Andre Brink and
Leroux whose works were originally written in Afrikaans in South Africa.

Fox speaks with great enthusiasm for the work of her august relative.
She recalls a flamboyant, ebullient character given to quoting French and
Spanish poetry at the breakfast table. In describing his university of life
experiences throughout Europe in the 1930’s and 40’s she says:
“Uys was the first Afrikaans writer to cross the borders of language and
politics, and of the country, and to step out of the Germanic box in which
Afrikaans literature found itself at that time. His various translations of
European literature exposed Afrikaans readers to the works of Mediterranean
writers like Pablo Neruda, Paul Eluard and Frederico Garcia Lorca.
Krige’s translation of Lorca’s Yerma the best translation in the Afrikaans language
along with his translations of King lear and Twelfth Night and the poems of Neruda and Eluard and Lorca.

His detailed search for the best possible word-match to the writer’s original intention is embodied in a fevered exposition of his translation of King Lear. Andre Roodtman plays, among others, a father figure to the young Krige, and his step into Shakespeare’s tragic king is minutely scrutinised by the attentive translator (Neels van Jaarsveld) as a test of his
interpretative efforts. Francois le Roux completes the cast as a periodic foil for Van Jaarsveld and the provider of appropriate musical ambience.

Krige’s continental sojourn, during the rise of fascism, permitted him to recognise the insidious warning signs in the emergence of Afrikaner nationalism. His outspoken humanist views ultimately caused his professional isolation. JC Kannemeyer’s new biography, Die Goue Seun (Die Lewe en Werk van Uys Krige) presented for the first time at Oudtshoorn records political machinations at the highest levels that prevented the literary establishment from recognising Krige’s work. Fox sees the play and the book as steps towards righting this imbalance. In preparation for Botha’s and Basson’s work, Fox identified 46 professional and
personal highlights in Krige’s life that are theatrically fertile.

It is impossible to cover a life as diverse as Krige’s on the stage, says Basson, so the play works on an emotional rather than a purely narrative level. Time is not linear. For example the young Krige explains his older self’s life-long passion for words. He is reputed to have written his first poem at age 14 while Tram-ode, regarded by some as his best poem, was completed at the tender age of 23. Krige’s gently self-deprecating voice returns throughout the play:
“Ek wou altyd maar net rugby speel … maar ek was te stadig.”
(”All I really wanted to do was to play rugby, but I was too slow.”)

Krige actually played rugby in Toulon, and later became a swimming instructor or “professeur de natation et de culture physique” as the French called him. Fox’s specific knowledge of the lives of her grandmother and uncle was largely cursory until she began the work of compiling material to be developed into the script, which included listening to about 12 hours of interviews with Uys and Sannie together with Saartjie Botha who later put the play together in a miraculously short time. This abundant vocal archive was the source of most of the lines delivered by Van Jaarsveld and also assisted him in mimicking Krige’s distinctive high-speed and erratic speech patterns.

Fox remembers Sannie as a woman in her eighties, while the character she portrays is in her forties. “The Sannie in the play is a generic representation of the women in my family. There are probably bits of me and my mother and my aunt, blended with personal memories of my grandmother, though strangely people who knew my grandmother and came to see the play, said they recognized Sannie particularly in the way I used my hands, which pleased me very much.” she says. It was said jokingly of Krige that his umbilical cord had never been cut.
His mother is an undeniably strong influence on his life and work. Her letters would sometimes scold him for ill discipline, and suggest that he could improve as a writer if he were less flighty and more focused on the task at hand.

Krige’s oeuvre consists of a wealth of poems and drama in Afrikaans, and essays and short stories in English and Afrikaans and translations of major works of other writers. Many of his short stories were written in English because due to the subject matter would have been difficult to publish in Afrikaans in those days for example the much travelled Death of a Zulu), and a novel, The Way Out, which deals with his escape from a German POW camp. At the time of its publishing, to have produced the story in Afrikaans would have branded him a traitor. The novel was finally published in Afrikaans in 1987 (the year of his death) as Morestêr oor die Abruzzi.

The production of Die Goue Seun was made possible with the financial support of the KKNK and the National Arts Council of South Africa (The NAC).

Keywords: Afrikaans, Arts-and-Culture, Die-Goue-Seun, Grethe-Fox, interview, KKNK, NAC, performing-arts, Sannie-Uys, Theatre