White Men With Weapons.
Greig Coetzee, writer and lone performer of his award winning
theatre piece 'White Men With Weapons', says that, among other
things, one of the central functions of his work is to show
that "South Africans can actually laugh at themselves".
"South Africans, under apartheid, had these stereotypes of dour, humourless racists, and over-earnest, humourless anti-apartheid activists. I wanted to show that South Africans are not as uptight as some come across, and that we can actually have a good laugh, even about serious shit."
And the substance with which his work is concerned is certainly serious, relating as it does to South Africa's transition from the oppression of apartheid to the freedom of liberal democracy. Coetzee viewed much of the transition from within the ranks and barbed wire fences of the South African Defence Force (SADF).
"I was compulsorily drafted into the military at the end of 1989," he recalls, "and I was this very self-righteous left-wing student who had fairly na•ve but nonetheless earnest motivations."
But, Coetzee points out, Nelson Mandela was released three months into his service, and his situation became very interesting, in that he was able to observe, from the inside, the 'machine' that had "propped up apartheid" and "had remained the same for 40 years, suddenly changing overnight".
"We were halfway through a series of propaganda lectures at the time, on all sorts of nonsense that the apartheid government pushed down people's throats... and suddenly overnight we were told those lectures didn't happen... it was like something out of George Orwell."
Most fascinating, Coetzee says, was observing "people who had been fighting...there for 20 to 30 years, suddenly realising that they didn't have an enemy anymore, and that everyone's saying they are the bad guys."
Coetzee says his play documents these reactions in a way that is serious, funny, and non-judgemental. Despite the ranks being filled with racists and "psychopaths", he came, especially in writing and performing this reflective piece, to realise the human complexities of the situation.
"By the end of it I still despised most of the people who were there. I'd made a few friends, I'd come across a few real human beings, I'd come across some severely damaged human beings, and I'd also come across a number of psychopaths who should have never been trusted with an automatic rifle. But I felt I'd seen both the human side and the real side of the psychopath, and I wanted to record it in all its complexity. I could no longer stand in judgement of them, because I was one of them, and it was a case of [either] writing the easy play, which is just to say what a bunch of bastards they all were, or writing the difficult play."
And in writing the "difficult play", Coetzee has enjoyed international success, taking the work from South Africa and travelling everywhere from New York to Holland and Singapore, as well as the Edinburgh Fringe where he won best stage actor and the Fringe First Award. But all this success, he points out, has not come without sharply varying audience reactions.
"I had a university professor in South Africa come up to me once and say 'I think that your play is racist', and I said, 'well, I'll take that as a compliment because I know I'm not racist, and if you can no longer see the writer, then that's a good sign.'
Wil McGinley
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Greig Coetzee performs 'White Men With Weapons' at Union Hall (Adelaide Uni) from Thurs 9 March
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