FringeReview UK 2024

The Unlikely Secret Agent

Unlikely Productions

Genre: Biographical Drama, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Political, Theatre, World Theatre

Venue: Marylebone Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

The Unlikely Secret Agent for some of us proves an unlikely prequel. The names of ANC activists Ronnie and Eleanor Kasrils, celebrated in South Africa for acts that would have them today tortured in Belmarsh, might touch playgoing memories. Set in 1962-63, written and directed by playwright and actor Paul Du Toit in 2021, it plays for just a few days at the newly-appointed Marylebone Theatre, just bearing off Baker Street till September 1^st.

Kasrils himself in 2011 published The Unlikely Secret Agent a tribute to his wife’s courage. Du Toit has dramatised it and with South African government funding it makes its UK debut.

A kind of sequel appeared in the UK first though. A much older Ronnie Kasrils features in Gail Louw’s play The Ice Cream Boys at Jermyn Street in 2019. There, set in the present day, an older Ronnie confronts Jacob Zuma at a health clinic. Du Toit has translated Louw into Afrikaans and Afrikaans is spoken onstage here by the South African cast (Wessel Pretorius, De Klerk Oelofse, Sanda Shandu, Ntlanhla Kutu and Erika Breytenbach-Marais). Accents are thick and fast; there’s moments of Zulu too. If you think that’s off-putting, as the (often conversant) audience explode with laughter all around you, forget it. You’ll be hooked.

Now released from acting a lead part himself (as he once did) Du Toit ensures his five-handed, mostly multi-roling cast create a fugal texture of three stages in the ordeal of Eleanor Kasrils. Her activism with Ronnie, which extends to blowing up the entire power-grid of Natal, post-offices and secret police headquarters without killing anyone. Then Eleanor‘s interrogation and torture; finally her incarceration in a mental hospital as she fakes breakdown and bids to escape.

Interrogation scenes repeat throughout, in flash-forwards and flashbacks, a witty display of Walter Benjamin’s quotable gestures. Scenes are repeated verbatim so words become a short-hand litany, reinforcing the choric effect and nightmare.

Trauma is foretold and recalled: some of the latter are unnecessary, even as PTSD; the two hours traffic might be reduced by 20 minutes and occasionally expanded to deliver a little more clarity with accents. Beyond that, it’s an enthralling true-life narrative artfully filleted from Kasrils’ narrative into vivid drama.

The cast play gender and race-fluid roles with a brio and humour brought out by Du Toit. It’s not certain how much of it Kasril himself is possessed of: he certainly comes across as mordantly funny in Louw’s play and Du Toit lays this side or all it’s worth. Warning: there was huge anti-Semitic bias in South Africa, brought out by the police portrayed here. Its parliament decided only by one vote to side with the allies in World War Two, and not axis. Like the US, Communist Jews were a synonymous racialised group.

Eleanor (Erika Breytenbach-Marais) appears as Scottish-born daughter of a librarian, working for him, where she’s chatted up and finally radicalised by Ronnie Kasrils (Wessel Pretorius, who also takes on the sidekick cop Lt Wessels, asylum-incarcerated Franny, a mild-mannered Physician Superintendent, and nurse).

Breytenbach-Marais manages a transition from shy then sly wit exploding into passion, an obdurate, almost adamantine stoniness in the face of later questioning; or mute co-operation with medical authorities. With Breytenbach-Marais ever onstage, it’s a tireless tennis-match with Eleanor buffeted between present bliss and future torture, with violence enacted onstage (fight and intimacy co-ordination has been taken in-house, palpable with a high level of trust between actors).

A warmly bewitching series of duologues are the core feature between Breytenbach-Marais and Pretorius. Pretorius like the other cast-members effortlessly morphs into accents and genders, and as fast-talking Ronnie introduces Eleanor to his own set, far more accommodating than her friends with latent anti-Semitism and worries over equal rights (deliciously, and sadly replicated by the female inmates, themselves victims of oppression).

As their activities and risk ratchets up the tight chase and flight across a series of tableaux ends in Ronnie’s escape as a wanted man though Eleanor’s sacrifice. What happens afterwards reminds us how any apartheid system works (Kasrils himself has never let this rest, and – spoiler –  is active today).

Breytenbach-Marais’s Eleanor is subjected to a gallimaufry of interrogative roles and ordeals. Sanda Shandu plays urbane characters: silken deadly Major Steenkamp, and elsewhere giggly Selma, activist Sonny Singh, sympathetic but uncomprehending police psychiatrist Dr Hobbs who gives Eleanor the option of psychiatric hospital, Eleanor’s outraged father Jimmy Logan, as well as profoundly nervous student who plays a part in an escape bid. He’s funny and touching as a sympathetic Matron, and an unwatchful night watchman.

De Klerk Oelofse’s Lieutenant Grobler as state-twisted torturer, attracted to and viciously beating up  Eleanor when tacitly left alone with her is a masterclass in unstable switchback, showing where method ends and impulse begins. Grobler is a study of licence to lose control, to violent impulses masquerade as officialdom. He stands for all such individuals privileged and warped by the system.  Oelofse also suggests Grobler is half in love with Eleanor, attracted to her as a blonde “Christian” quasi-Aryan in the “clutches of a Jew”. And “wants to help”.

Just how Oelofse “helps” is the most chilling and series of unpredictable scenes in the work. Oelofse needs release: his fluttery, Swannie, activist Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim, and vignettes as a lady on the bus, waiter, and passer-by almost act as release valves of blank incomprehension into the existence of a Grobler.

Ntlanhla Kutu takes on a brief role as bluff Officer Malan, extravagantly comic Wanda in the hospital, Billy Nair (in an escape vehicle),  and Eleanor’s mother Mrs Helen Logan. But Kutu shines particularly as Precious, the unnoticed and racially-abused hospital cleaner who plays a pivotal role by degrees. The exchanges between Kutu and Breytenbach-Marais are some of the most moving.

Though an interval breaks the two hours, and the shorter second-half might be shorter still with some flashbacks remitted, this play will hold you riveted. Both the stagecraft – always trust an actor to know how dialogue works and scenes sizzle – and the themes are urgent, laced with low comedy and high ideals.

There’s scant details of production, but the effectively sparse set with tables and chairs works well in this ideal space (with its ideally warm Steiner School wooden-clad acoustic), though sometimes when four seated characters stage-left speak upstage, details are lost. Some useful visual projections and text open and close the show. Set, lighting and technical credits mention Du Toit, Lize-Marie Wait and Salene Bekker.

It’s fortuitous, though not designed, that this work illustrates contemporary racisms and Kasrils still infuriates many by pointing it up. He has one feels earned some right to. Above all though, The Unlikely Secret Agent is a love story and tribute to one woman’s heroism and resource. How it ends I urge you to discover in this sizzling paean to humanity.

Published August 29, 2024August 30, 2024 by Simon Jenner