Bitter Winter: the show will go on but what of the people in it?

Mail & Guardian

03-06-2025

In from the cold: A scene from Bitter Winter, Paul Slabolepszy's new play, which is on at the Baxter in Cape Town. Photos: RegardsVisser
A new play by the masterful Paul Slabolepszy is always a cultural event. His latest is in many ways a form of meta-theatre, conveying a deep sense of the tragedy that awaits this country's artists at the tail end of life. But it is also a story of hope for the future.
The trick, of course, is to stretch and expand time. That ability possessed by great writers to use words and dialogue, dramatic conflict and connection to parse open and peer inside those crucial moments between people.
A well-made play goes inside and examines the interior landscape of the human soul and lays it out for an audience in ways that are entertaining, gripping and — if you are very lucky — capable of shifting your understanding of life itself.
A great play puts human beings under a microscope, letting us under their skins, allowing us to see inside their souls so we get an inkling of what it means to be human.
Among the most capable writers practising this sort of literary alchemy is Paul Slabolepszy, a legend of South African stage (and screen), and someone who has consistently placed this country's people under a microscope and taught audiences something about who we are. And, perhaps even more significantly, who we're capable of being.
That's what struck me hardest while watching his latest play, a three-hander that debuted in Joburg earlier this year and is showing at the Baxter in Cape Town. It is not merely a dramatisation of an encounter between two very different men, it is in fact a celebration of what ultimately connects them.
It is a play about what we share. And it is a play that makes you want to be a better person, to try harder and to work at looking more deeply into the eyes of other humans — especially strangers and presumed enemies.
Bitter Winter is directed by Lesedi Job and, between them, a team of fastidious designers (set, lighting and sound are all nuanced and compelling) and three actors, what they've crafted is an instant classic, a humbling show that manages to contain an entire universe of human experience. It is wisdom distilled into something warm and tender, funny and entertaining.
It is in some respects a small play, no interval and with most of the dialogue between two actors at opposite ends of their careers, characters who at first glance seem polar opposites, unlikely to ever see eye to eye. But Slabolepszy's triumph is that, like a sculptor, he's able to carve away the superficial exterior and expose the human beings at their core.
It is riveting to watch, like a live dissection executed with incredible skill and grace and with great care. He puts beautiful truths and vivid stories into the mouths of the play's two stars, reveals their inner workings in honest, measured, sparkling dialogue, so that, by the end of it, you're genuinely touched, eyes doubtless a little wet. It never skips through time, nor does it use effects or stagey gimmicks.
'Now is the winter of our discontent …': Lesedi Job, the director of Bitter Winter, a three-hander written by Paul Slabolepszy. Photos: Gustav Gerdener
It is one space, a casting agency waiting room where the kettle's on the fritz and the flimsy excuse for a coffee station is stocked with the cheap and nasty instant stuff.
Plus there's a presumably emotionless clock-watching production assistant-type running around, always talking to actors with her back to them. As it turns out, she's human, too.
Somehow, in this world of quick, fast, short sound bites, Slabolepszy puts words, sentences and memories together in ways that make you want to really listen to the stories, the longer the better.
And when his words find their way into the mouths of such consummate actors as André Odendaal and Oarabile Ditsele, the result feels urgent, precious and prescient.
Odendaal plays Jean-Louis, a much older, wiser and poorer actor who survives by occasionally covering shifts at a corner café and otherwise drawing a stipend from the Theatre Benevolent Fund. He does not even possess a cellphone.
Ditsele's Prosper Mangane is, by contrast, a young, streetwise know-it-all, full of intelligence gleaned from a short but tempestuous life, and he comes pre-loaded with unfiltered disdain for old white men.
The question of whether his disdain is the result of a specific chip on his shoulder, a characteristic of impatient youth or casual indifference to a stranger who is chewing up the oxygen in the room is part of the play's dramatic unfolding.
What unfolds, too, is proof you do not need complicated plots, nor an avalanche of profanities, no overt politics, tales of abuse, nor some horrifying hidden secret to generate something powerful and impactful on stage. You simply need truth, stories with heart and relationships between characters whose underlying conflict is capable of going somewhere.
You're set up from the start to assume Jean-Louis is cantankerous and gruff. That he is some badly-dressed fuddy-duddy looking after number one.
And it's such assumptions that get knocked down again and again in Bitter Winter, a play that's figuratively about those bitter twilight years of old age but also, more literally, takes place on a cold winter afternoon in downtown Joburg.
The audience is also set up to instantly judge and characterise Prosper, played so adorably and effortlessly by Ditsele that you almost assume that, like his character, he's not putting in the work, that perhaps he really is simply slouching around, easing into the role, doing what comes naturally.
Which is often the bone older people like Jean-Louis have to pick with young people — they're unwilling to put in the hard slog. They think they know everything and, in some respects, they do.
Prosper has quickly ratcheted up fame, has all the indulgent playthings of a get-rich-quick lifestyle, including a warm thermal undershirt in his bag and an Audi with a ding that'll cost a small fortune to fix.
The casting agency waiting room says it all, though: the behind-the-scenes reality of an industry that is often associated with glamour and opening-night fanfare.
But what we're confronted with here is anything but glitzy; it's downright appalling, not even a thought for a bit of heating to keep actors warm while waiting for some hotshot film director to arrive from the airport where he's just landed, no doubt having flown first class.
The traditions Bitter Winter draws on are rich, from the great speeches of Shakespeare to Beckett's absurdist set-up of having two characters endlessly waiting for the arrival of some god-like figure. And there's the familiarity of something known to all of us — being uncomfortably stuck in a room with a stranger.
Slabolepszy is such an expert on the human condition, and knows so well how to find the best in people, that he's able to draw his characters not into a punch-up, but into a far more dazzling and purposeful expression of all their inner turmoils, memories, hopes, dreams and hurts.
Then there's that moment of mutual recognition, the point at which what we witness on stage is an expression of our shared humanity.
Something you notice is that, despite his complaints about the cold and the physical pain he's in, Jean-Louis does not feel especially sorry for himself.
To an extent, he has accepted his fate, knows enough about how the narrative plays out to realise how and why his life has taken the turn it has. There's a kind of sadness in that, too, but of course this tragic old thespian has been schooled not only by life but also by the parts he's played.
And he's comforted, perhaps, by the knowledge that he still has it in him to act — and to do so with everything in his soul. He proves as much, in fact, in a heart-wrenching scene where, at Prosper's insistence, he performs a speech by Richard III's Duke of Gloucester.
As Prosper watches Jean-Louis give the performance of a lifetime you see a switch being turned in the young man's heart. He has never had someone mentor him, never known anyone to take the time to show him what acting can in fact be.
It's a profound and stirring moment, one in which theatre becomes a place of healing, a sanctuary where souls meet, a space where reality is shaped into something new.
Bitter Winter will be playing at the Baxter Studio in Cape Town until 14 June.