Jemma Kahn has thrown all caution to the wind and upped the ante with the exotic theatre style she has been experimenting with in SA, writes Hans Pienaar
Jemma Kahn has thrown all caution to the wind and upped the ante with the exotic theatre style she has been experimenting with in SALucian Freud , Picasso and Francis Bacon ham it up. Picture: WOORDFEES/RETHA FERGUSON
I saw it some days ago at the Stellenbosch Woordfees, apparently an expanded version of the piece that debuted in Grahamstown in 2018. Judging from comments after the well-attended show, theatregoers were intrigued, but many did not quite get it, and were left unmoved. Should we be sponsoring such apparently irrelevant work? was the unasked question.
The plot roughly resembles the life stories of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, at the time of Bacon’s relationship with George Dyer, a cockney burglar, who was painted by both the artists in the distorted, “ugly” fashions for which they became notorious in the yellow press. Also dragged in is Lucian Freud’s love interest, the promiscuous aristocrat Caroline Blackwood. Both artists are members of a mysterious Paris club, as are Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Pablo Picasso.
When it first gets highlighted, the vampiric theme fills one with dismay, the suspicion that Kahn is self-indulgently overdoing it. But she camps up the vampire element to a C-grade version of what you would find in cinemas today. All of this accumulates into showing that not only does the artist borrow the stories all over again for her own narcissistic purposes, she couldn’t care less for proper production values, the sine qua non of the elitist culture industry.
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