Bearing it: Champ At The Fugard Theatre – Cultural Review

20130421_0720Feeling depressed that your life is going nowhere? That you are a failure and a loser? Don’t. Instead go and see Champ, a show about talent going nowhere fast, now showing at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town. Written by Louis Viljoen, based on the personal experiences of himself and his acting friends, Champ has been awarded the 2012 Fleur du Cap Theatre Award for Best New South African Script, as well as being nominated in two additional categories – the Rosalie van der Gucht Prize for New Directors and Best Supporting Actor. Now in its second run, Champ is a black comedy that promises to touch your funny bone and your heart. It stars Mark Elderkin, Nick Pauling, Pierre Malherbe  and Jenny Stead, as well as Oliver Booth, a recent graduate from the University of Cape Town. All have been well-selected for their roles and perform brilliantly, with perhaps only Stead’s (very brief) performance feeling slightly less convincing than her counterparts’.

With hilarious dialogue, the script deals with things both bizarre and commonplace in a genius interplay of the ordinary, extraordinary and nightmarish nature of every day scraping by. Three actors working in bear costumes as children’s entertainers in a mall, have lost dignity, hope and, to a certain extent, their sanity. They have only five more days until payday and feel glumly confident of making it until then, that is until a devious little child begins torturing them and urinating on their bear costumes. The consequences of this terror’s antics are devastating.

The dialogue is richly explicit and graphic, meaning that it carries a strict age restriction of no under 18s. Be prepared to learn phrases and curses that you wouldn’t have been able to dream up on your worst days!

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Author: Karen Jennings