Cracking the bourgeois shell
Irving Wardle, The Times, April 4, 1976
Too late for the Court's South African season, but well able to stand up for itself, David Lan's play again demonstrates the political resonance of the Cape Town scene and establishes its 21-year-old author as this theatre's most promising recruit since the young Christopher Hampton. Strictly, Mr Lan was launched over here by InterAction whose production of Painting a Wall has transferred to the Howff.
For countries with a queasy social conscience, the most useful artists are those who make connexions; linking up the comfortably insulated lives of the fortunate with those who do the dirty work of preserving the apparatus of privilege. This is the purpose of Bird Child, as it is of several of our own young writers (David Hare's Knuckle is one obvious example); what is more unusual about the play is Mr Lan's success in devising a form that cracks the bourgeois individualist shell. Until its final scenes, this is an exceptionally elegant piece of long-range plotting.
In outline, it tells the story of two women: Anna who finds herself pregnant after sleeping around with students and policemen; and the middle-aged Hester. also pregnant, who is leaving her husband for a police colonel. Mr Lan articulates this situation by breaking the action into chapter-like episodes, each focusing on a different character. Widely separated to begin with, the people gradually converge; and, as they do so, the atmosphere becomes increasingly loaded with shocks and ironies. The drop-out Anna pays one of her rare visits home and turns out to be the conformist Hester's daughter. The colonel and one of Anna's ex-lovers run the same police station. Sometimes the irony is on the audience's side; as where the colonel, after grilling Anna as an agitator, finally discovers who she is.
This anticipates the play's main development; which is to show the birth of a political conscience. It takes place in two stages; first with Anna's exchange of casual sex for motherhood; and then with her maternal sympathy for her mother's black maid who has been arrested for sheltering her two children in the house. She parades the street with antifascist banners, gets support elofrom her boy-friend who drums up a crowd of student protesters, and secures' the maid's release. At this point the demo breaks up, leaving Anna as a solitary Antigone fjgure determined to bold her tround until they admit "that looking after your children is not a crime."
It is a possible development, and Jacqueline Stanbury plays its stages with unquestionable accuracy of feeling. But the character makes more sense for the light it throws on the other figures than it does in itself. In Anna's case, the irony breaks down.
Mr Lan does not idealize her. She claims that she has at last found her identity and learned to talk: but what she says is pretty incoherent, and even her emotions are no match for the devil's advocate opposition she gets from the police colonel. But, at the same time, the play presents her as the only positive, incorruptible figure on a stage where everyone else is compromised.
Otherwise the picture is eloquently dispassionate. For quite good reasons, the students decide that her fight is not theirs. Hester (Marjie Lawrence) loses her child and sinks into life-hating domesticity. The police, having allowed the black maid to escape, quietly catch up and eliminate the rest of her family. Thanks partly to two superb performances by Geoffrey Bateman and Nigel Hawthorne you are made to feel the actual weight of existing authority, and the improbability of anything shifting it. Besides this, Nicholas Wright's production exerts a powerful visual fascination of its own. As. for instance, in one scene where James Aubrey, as Anna's boyfriend, bids farewell to a clapped-out motor bike and leaves it alone on the stage ; thanks to the tenderness of the playing, this ugly metal wreck, its headlamp turned at a dejected anglem, takes on all the pathos of an abandoned old horse.
A young man's anger
Milton Shulman, Evening Standard, April 25, 1974
DAVID LAN, who wrote Bird Child at the Theatre Upstairs, is 21 years old and his play sounds like it.
This is not meant to be a disparaging remark. For Bird Child has all the passion, anger, directness and sincerity one usually associates with the literary work of the young.
Being a South African, Mr Lan has seen enough to arouse his resentment and what is going on in his native land. But he is wise enough to tether his despair to the reality of the situation.
It is perhaps natural that he should record the ugliness of apartheid through the experiences of a group of young people who have demonstrated against the regime.
Particularly he focuses upon Anna, an easy-going young girl who has slept with so many men that when she is pregnant she has to question them all about dates to discover the father.
But when Anna witnesses what the police do to a middle-aged Bantu servant - working for her mother - who has been illegally harbouring her two sons in a white area without the necessary permits, she is aroused to passionate protest on behalf of all motherhood,
With placards reading: "Mothers Unite Against Police Dictators" she pickets the police station and through the support of hundreds of students eventually forces the police to release the black woman.
It is in her confrontation with the police colonel, whose tactics are to avoid violence at all costs because conciliation is the best way to dampen down student protest, that Mr Lan impressively shows us the difficult task liberal opinion has in defeating the subtle tactics of the Afrikaaner authority sure of their power and their cause.
In an ironic inventory of the fate of all those involved in the demonstration, it is seen that the white students get minor penalties while the black men are jailed for life, shot or seriously wounded.
Written with a surprisingly sure touch and with a nice sense of humour Bird Child is perhaps weakest when it indulges in overheated descriptive writing about the glum prospects for mankind.
Nor is the conversion of Anna, pleasingly played by Jacqueline Stanbury, from a non-political nymphomaniac to a passionate advocate of human rights, entirely convincing. I'm afraid, too, that the plot which depends upon Anna's mother also becoming pregnant by the police colonel is a coincidence that needs some swallowing.
Nigel Hawthorne is excellent as the stiff, weary but determined police chief, and Geoffrey Bateman is convincingly ferocious as a brutal, callous policeman on the make.
BIRD CHILD
Sunday Times April 28, 1976
Wholly unexpectedly, David Lan's Bird Child (Upstairs Theatre) turns out to be as independent-minded, if not as skilful, as if it were written by a first-class commercial dramatist. So much so, in fact, that one wonders if the Royal Court has not let itself be hoaxed. Dealing with South Africa, Mr Lan does what made Anouilh's "Antigone" so alarming to its first audiences: the most convincing arguments and the intellectual superiority are given to the spokesman of authoritaranism, in this case a police colonel who, in Nigel Hawthorne's cool and powerful performance, visibly grows in stature as the play progresses.
But Mr Lan goes even further than Anouilh, politically the most defiant dramatist in the world. Anouilh's Antigone was a splendid figure, fully able to stand up to Creon. But Mr Lan's counterpart to her is a physically dirty, incompetent slut mentally inept. She sleeps compulsively either with students or with the police. Her sympathy for oppressed blacks is based on personal motives. Her rebellion is stupidly conceived, and morally without effect. At the end she is left indulging in hysterical fantasies about throwing her illegitimate baby out of the window, to see if it can fly.
Whatever the conscious intention, "Bird Child" is a sensitive lament for the moral and intellectual decline of the liberal conscience, spoiled here and there by a few melodramatic coincidences. It also has a bad beginning wwith some unappetising displays of private parts. Mr Warner could teach Mr Lan a good deal.
Bird Child
Michael Billington, Guardian, April 25, 1976
IT IS PERHAPS a bit tough on David Lan that his play about the South African situation, "Bird Child," should open at the Theatre Upstairs when the Fugard-Kani-Ntshona works are still fresh in memory. But although Mr Lan, a 21-year-old anthropology student at LSE, has a lot to learn about stage-craft, he's well worth listening to because he has an original point of view and because he knows a dramatist must go way beyond propagandist condemnation of a discredited system.
His message seems to be that the chief hope in South Africa lies with the young, liberal generation who instinctively reject the old shibboleths and racist myths. His heroine, Anna, is a middle-class drop-out who is impregnated by a careless student and who suddenly finds herself waging a fierce campaign against the Cape Town police for their detention of her mother's Bantu servant (the woman's crime is illegally harbouring her two sons). Mr Lan is enough of a realist to know that Anna and her friends go straight into the police files for their activities ; but the point about their protest is that it is based on a reflex humanism and the assumption is that Anna's own life-loving values will be passed on to her fatherless child.
Without knowing South Africa firsthand, it's difficult to say how widespread is the existence of a classless, internationalist youth that has more in common with its contemporaries in Paris and Prague than with the older white generation. But although the contrast between fertile youth and barren age is a bit too neat, at least Mr Lan has the theatrical savvy to give the devil some of the best tunes: in the play's key scene Anna is confronted by a highly intelligent police colonel who argues that his side will always come out top because it not only has the force but also controls language and communication as well. It is an excellent dialectical scene that more than makes up for the play's uneconomical stretches of dialogue
Nicholas Wright's production also contains two strong performances from Jacqueline Stanbury whose Anna is lust as muddled, gaily promiscuous, and goodhearted as many young people the world over and from Nigel Hawthorne whose po1ice colonel conceals a sharp mind behind a fussily bureaucratic manner. Technically, Mr Lan has a lot to learn; but that is far less significant than the fact that he views his own South African generation with a cautious, wary, hard-earned optimism.
Staggering coincidences
Victoria Radin, Observer, April 28, 1976
DAVID LAN, a 21-year-old South African student at the London School of Economics, has the distinction of having two plays on in London. Painting a Wall (now at the Howff) is a tautly constructed one-acter about four Cape Coloured wallpainters (played by Cape actors), whose frustrations, aired in inspired, often funny patois, surface during a day's work.
By contrast, Bird Child (Theatre Upstairs), Lan's first full-length play, is vastly less powerful. Set in a middle-class drop-out Cape community, with its familiar pursuits of sex, dope and demos, and performed by British actors with uneasy South African accents, its message comes over curiously second-hand and diffuse.
The play depends on two parallel plots (drop-out girl pregnant by student; middle-class woman pregnant by police colonel), and a series of staggeing coincidences (woman and girl are mother and daughter; daughter ends up organizing a demo at the police station run by the colonel and staffed by an ex-lover).
The first part of the play, in which the daughter and her friends are loving, carefree hippines, and the mother and her world are all tensel and desperation, is too pat. The second half, in which the daughter, under the influence of her unborn child, changes into an ardent campaigner for civil rights, bitterly alone and grimly dedicated to her child, is increasingly confused.
Through all this, Lan makes some interesting asides on pregnancy and birth, male-female relationships, mothers and daughters, and the differences between men. Inside ' Bird Child' there are probably several good plays that are going to get out. It is naturalistically and quitely decorated by a South African, Nicholas Wright, and competently performed in particular by Jacqueline Stanbury as the daughter and Nigel Hawthorne as the colonel.
