Fiona Gordon: Eight characters tell this story, of a package which must travel from Johannesburg to Cape Town…

…although the story speaks more of the characters whose hands/cars/houses it passes through, than about the package itself.

And James Cairns is the one (sometimes sitting) man on stage that does it all! With shaved head, in black pants and long-sleeved top, his neutral appearance and single, simple wooden-chair-prop allows for a blank slate on which his colourful characters and their contexts can be drawn, on this journey through the stereotypes and just-the-right-side-of-caricature characters that make up the diverse landscape of people in our country.

Across race, social strata, geography and levels of inebriation, he elicits laughs through portrayal of characters so genuine that it is almost impossible to imagine he could be anyone else – until he is… but the transitions between scenes are so distinct, and well managed, it’s easy to follow him from one to the next.

Cairns has a way of creating an expectation, and then serving something else instead – his ‘hangover communicating with him’, as he ‘sokkies his way across the Platteland’. Teasing the imagination into creating worlds around his wooden chair, I get so caught up in the drama of the scenes he creates with his words, I sometimes lose track a little of the detail of how they link together, and when the journey ends and reality descends, I’m left a little perturbed trying to make sense of it all. But the images are so real, I suspect they will leave their marks on my imagination long after this run is through.

The Sitting Man is written, directed and acted by the remarkably talented James Cairns, and plays at The Kalk Bay Theatre nightly until 21 August 2010.

James Cairns also features in ‘Dirt’ which runs 25 Aug to 11 Sep, also at the Kalk Bay Theatre. Book for the final week of Sitting Man and book for Dirt at the same time, and get both shows for R185 instead of R200. Further details at www.kbt.co.za

Fiona Gordon
fiona@artslink.co.za

Browse Timeline

• « Art of Rock – How an amazing show came to life
• » Lecture by jewellery expert, Joanna Hardy at Casa Labia

Add a Comment