19/01/2008 14:18 - (SA)
Quanita Adams: Actress extraordinaire
This award-winning actress of stage and screen, returns to the theatre in ‘Kroes’, a uniquely South African play. She speaks to CARL COLLISON about humble beginnings and coming home
‘I was told to never, ever mention this, but I’m going to anyway,” says Quanita Adams. The actress, evidently in the mood for divulging information she shouldn’t be, relays in her typically deadpan, tongue-in-cheek style, the story of her first professional production as an actress: a Boney M tribute.
“There we were, on the back of this car, driving through gay Greenpoint, singing Little Drummer Boy,” she reminisces, obviously enjoying the hilarious memory of having to sing the line: “Para papam pam!”
The person who has tried (in vain) to swear this 30-year-old University of Cape Town graduate to secrecy is the Fleur du Cap Award-winning director Heinrich Reisenhoffer, who will be directing her in the up-coming theatre production, Kroes. In it, Adams will act alongside soapie stalwarts, Isidingo’s Kim Engelbrecht and 7de Laan’s Nico Panagiotopoulos.
Set in 1960s South Africa, Kroes is based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Pat Stamatelos. It tells the tale of the young, coloured woman, Patty Peters (played by Engelbrecht) who, after her mother’s death, is sent away to live with her aunt and ends up in Johannesburg where she meets a handsome Greek man (Panagiotopoulos), with whom she falls in love. Forced to choose between a love forbidden by the Immorality Act and her family, Patty has to decide whether to reclassify herself as white or not. When she does eventually decide to stick with the man she loves, and gets reclassified, her relationship with her family suffers. She, according to Adams, “eventually loses more than she gains”.
This casting of Adams and Engelbrecht seems a little odd. Engelbrecht, as Lolly in Isidingo, is one of South Africa’s most recognisable faces. Adams, relatively unknown in spite of her South African Film and TV Award-winning performance in Forgiveness, her multiple Fleur du Cap Awards and her role as Ivy Abrahams in KykNet’s Villa Rosa, is just not in the same popularity stratosphere as Engelbrecht. Adams is, however, the veteran in the more demanding world of theatre – a world that calls for the rawer, more immediately apparent display of acting skills.
Kroes is Engelbrecht’s second theatrical production and her first in Afrikaans. While Panagiotopoulos, who gets many a desperate housewife’s temperature soaring, can hardly be described as having set the theatre world on fire. Engelbrecht and Panagiotopoulos are steamingly sexy and both will have to rise above their pin-up status.
With Engelbrecht in the lead as Patty, Adams plays Letitia. “She’s a crazy, reckless soul who lives outside of the rules,” says Adams of her character. “She lives on the margins of her community, yet, when it comes to the crunch, would stick with them. She’s also a confidante to a lot of the characters, especially Patty, with whom she is best friends. It’s a classic best-girlfriend-from-your-teenage-years kind of relationship. Inevitably though, their lives follow different paths. While Patty lives this ‘white life’ Letitia stays behind and has a kid. Where Patty is quite serious about life and has her anxieties, Letitia is carefree. She really serves as the counterpoint to Patty’s character.”
Adams is unfazed by my doubts about the casting. She’s invigorated by this seemingly odd casting decision. “It is very exciting to be working with Kim and Nico. It’s exciting to be around newer theatre practitioners. As opposed to some of the maybe more cynical actors around who might be like: ‘Oh, here we go… another production’, we were all intent on making a success of this production, workshopping the script together and making sure we get to tell the right story.”
The person most committed to ‘telling the right story’ is director Heinrich Reisenhoffer, says Adams. Reisenhoffer also directed the runaway hits Suip! and Joe Barber.
“Ironically he’s not coloured,” says Adams, who after a short contemplative pause, bestows upon him the status of honorary coloured with: “But he is actually, shame.”
How does she feel then, I enquire, about the trend of white directors assuming cultural custodianship over black lives, black stories, black pain. “Personally, I work with directors who show integrity and concentrate rather on their body of work, and Heinrich has an incredibly strong body of work,” she says without a trace of fake loyalty.
“Mostly, when the issues they are dealing with in a particular work are race-based, it is tempting for directors to mythologise. Either that or they become apologetic. What I love about Heinrich is that, from the onset, he did not want to tell the typical old-South Africa story and have the same old moans. It’s so sexy right now to go on about our horrible past; to go on about ‘die fokken wit mense’ or whatever, you know, but Heinrich was determined not to tell an Apartheid story, but rather a love story.”
Kroes marks a return to theatre for Adams after years of touring the globe with Michael Lessac’s award-winning Truth in Translation, which used testimonies from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as its focal point. Truth, features the music of Hugh Masekela and was hailed by Time magazine as “a testament to the human need to reconcile, and an examination of our capacity to do so.”
So, a love story is probably just the antidote she needs, says Adams. Although, Truth had its own rewards. “We got an email from an American soldier saying that, after seeing the play, he’d decided that he could never return to Iraq where he’d been stationed. He said he could never again pick up a gun.”
Truth also came with its own complexities. “When you’re talking to someone in Ireland and they say: ‘So you have democracy, big deal; so you can vote, big whoop!’ [Here Adams delivers a slew of unintelligible, unprintable expletives]. It is a big deal for me, as a black woman in South Africa to vote. Also, it was really hard to be away from home for so long.”
For Adams, ‘home’ is a far bigger concept than merely the bricks and mortar shell that keeps her safe from the elements. She displays an unreserved love for South Africa and swears her wholehearted devotion to bettering its theatre and film industries.
“Our tastes (as viewers) are changing. Soon directors will have to direct better shows, scriptwriters will have to write better scripts and actors will have to work harder and do better. With shows like Society [a brilliant four-part SABC1 series about four girlfriends trying to come to terms with suicide, tradition, ambition and sexuality], the fact that these were black women was almost incidental. The Lab, [the SAFTA Award-winning series set in a stock-broking firm and featuring such heavyweight talents as Terence Bridget and Nambitha Mpumlwana] – I freakin’ loved The Lab – as well as casting black women in lead roles, it showed us that gone are the days when we can only be the maid, or something funny for white people to laugh at. We should start by expecting more from our industry; from ourselves.”
What can we, as a generally quality theatre-starved public expect of Adams, post-Kroes? “Well, it’s back to Joburg for me. As a Cape Town actress coming to Joburg it’s really hard. You have to close the door on all the work you did in Cape Town, because, no matter what you did there, nobody here has worked with you, so it doesn’t really count for much. But, hey, that’s the game I signed up for so, for now, I’m just gonna keep my fists up and my chin down and keep producing work…Good work.”
With her current track record, and her self-effacing, yet wholly determined and self-assured attitude, it is hard to imagine Adams participating in anything below her high standard of what constitutes ‘good work’. No more Boney M tributes in the future for her. Guaranteed.
Catch Quanita Adams in Kroes at the Artscape theatre in Cape Town from January 29 – February 8. Call 021 421 7696 for bookings and more info.
‘We got an email from an American soldier saying that, after seeing ‘Truth in Translation’, he’d decided that he could never return to Iraq where he’d been stationed. He said he could never again pick up a gun’
TICKET GIVEAWAY
Pulse and the Suidoosterfees has four sets of double tickets for
Kroes
to give away. To be in the draw SMS: Pulse/Kroes, your name, age and home town to 33818 before Monday, January 28.
R1.50 per SMS
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