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Tim Plewman: The 21st-century caveman rides again

Tim Plewman: The 21st-century caveman rides again

A few days before Tim Plewman returns to the stage in ‘Defending the Caveman’, J. BROOKS SPECTOR spoke with the actor/writer/director/theatrical entrepreneur about his upcoming role and much more.

We meet in Tim Plewman’s quiet suburban home, steaming hot, excellent coffee in hand, a gentle rain in the garden. The room is calming and relaxed. There is a pair of comfortable leather sofas to ease into, some tasteful throw rugs in muted colours on the floor, and just the occasional bit of bric-a-brac from a full life scattered all around the room. In fact, everything looks just as one would expect it should, save for the occasional odd item here and there. The eye notices a club made from what looks like what may have come from a very large, extinct herbivore. There is a laundry basket-like creation, covered in faux hyena skin. And sitting on a bookshelf is something that looks remarkably like a human skull. Ah, these are some of the props for Plewman’s upcoming one-man role in Defending the Caveman.

Plewman is taking this work to various locales in South Africa. And despite his many performances of this work, this will be his first time he will appear in Caveman in Grahamstown. This year, of course, the festival will have a special focus on satire in South Africa, and Caveman should fit right in and be sold out every performance.

In this role, Plewman has travelled down this particular paleontological excavation on stage before. To be exact, he has done so 1,544 times already in Rob Becker’s play. When it originally appeared, it ran for five years on Broadway. It has subsequently been a hit around the world – and in a variety of languages as well. Plewman adapted the original American-flavoured text so as to have it successfully interrogate the local Weltanschauung – finding the inner South African Alley Oop and Mrs Oop. (In staging the work, Rex Garner had originally directed Plewman, and Plewman says that Garner is one of his original theatrical mentors – still a lifetime friend.)

At first blush, when one hears about Defending the Caveman, it is easy to think about it as a kind of dramatisation of the speculations around the origins of human behaviour that were popularised in books like Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape – or even certain chapters in Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden. All of these very popular books, in one way or another, had attempted to explore how the genetically-wired psyches of early hominids continue to affect how contemporary homo sapiens – us – respond to the threats, fears, rigours, challenges and opportunities of our modern era.

Defending the Caveman, however, does its thing a bit differently. It takes the tack that contemporary, reciprocal male and female responses to one another also have similarly deep roots in human evolution. And these come out in ways that are both unexpected and deeply revealing of those inner truths. “And from understanding, we can forgive.” He says that some people have even told him that watching this show helped save their marriages – and, in one extraordinary case, even brought a divorced couple back together to remarry after they had seen the play together as friends.

He also insists Caveman should not be seen as a kind of staged adaptation of the ideas contained in that more recent bestseller, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. It is much more tactile. Or, as he observes, the real key to the play is that here is “a man who has found a great truth, and he must tell everyone about it.” That very night, from the stage.

Plewman, himself, was last on stage at the Market Theatre and at the Grahamstown Festival in an unusual, even eerie one-man show, The Last Moustache. In this work, his character was an actor who had been coerced into becoming Adolph Hitler’s public doppelganger and stand-in, with the action set in Hitler’s Berlin bunker in the final days of World War II, just as the Germans were about to surrender.

Over a long, successful career, Plewman, of course, has been around the theatre for forty years – reaching all the way back to works like Chorus Line, in its original London Production. He met his American-born-wife in Chicago in South Africa, just by the way. He says he had to do everything in that show, all the dancing, singing and acting as a chorus line member and understudy for one of the leads. Great training for a successful, versatile career, of course, he adds.

Then, when he played the lead in a South African, live stage production of Singing in the Rain, he went off to learn tap dancing – after he had auditioned and won the role. That’s chutzpah. And so how did he avoid coming down with a permanent cold or the flu throughout the run of that show? He explains that his secret was that he insisted that they heat the water that had to pour down upon him, night after night after night. Clever, that.

Asked about his favourite stage moments, right off the bat he mentions Paul Slabolepszy play, Pale Natives, although he is quick to add that his experiences with Rex Garner – and, of course, Caveman, are right up there too. After all, if someone were to come up to you and offer you a part where you would have years of steady work in a great role, how would you respond? he asks rhetorically.

Plewman’s career has taken him through dozens of other live musicals, comedies and farces, films, television, corporate gigs and voice-over work, as well as all the plays and television scripts he has written, and managing a theatre. And there have even been the books he has written along the way as well. There is, for example, a health and exercise book for older people – fittingly titled Fitness for Old Farts – designed to help the over-60s crowd stay fitter and healthier into their golden years. Perhaps indicative of the times, this volume has become a non-fiction best seller locally.

In our conversation, Plewman settles back to reflect on a lifetime in the theatre, as well as the contemporary challenges now faced by the theatre industry, from competition from other media, from the changing texture of audiences less and less familiar with live theatre, and from the decline in actual physical spaces for theatre to take place. Along the way, we puzzle over why, for example, so many of the new musicals seem to have so few tunes that are really singable. Or, as he says, nowadays, “one leaves the theatre whistling the furniture instead of a tune.”

Over the years, Plewman said he found a niche – and a growing knack – for light comedies and farces, rather than works about societal struggles and the anger that had so often found a home in a venue like the Market Theatre in an earlier time. That leads to reminiscences about the quality of South African comedy and satire – then and now. There was the late Robert Kirby, for example, a comic with a carefully controlled, yet intensely bitter energy about him, even as he used a bit of clever sleight-of-hand to amplify his social and political criticisms. Today, however, not having political commentary – something that is just about people and how they deal with each other would seem to have a real place. That there is still so little of it may be due to the fact that South Africans seem not to have settled easily on a clear sense of self, although someone like Trevor Noah seems to have come closest to finding this groove.

Speaking about what he has not yet been able to do as an actor, he regrets he has yet to perform Shakespeare – or ballet for that matter. He says he’d love to have the role of Falstaff, for example, if such a thing were ever possible some day yet. He would be pretty good at that, given his expansive presence and that well-trained voice – although he would need a “fat suit” to be the convincing jolly fat man with an eye for the ladies. He adds that he would still like to perform in My Fair Lady, as either Henry Higgins – or Alfred P Doolittle.

In speaking about the theatrical universe more generally, Plewman says his personal philosophy is that a play, any play, must present a compelling total experience to the audience. The audience should be able to enter a theatre with a sense of gradually increasing anticipation – the venue itself should invite the audience to partake in the experience; it should be clean, and the work must be staged as best it can be. But there is a role for imagination in adversity. When The Last Moustache was on at the Market Theatre, because the entire area was a construction site with the theatre being rebuilt and a shopping mall, office buildings and a hotel being built adjacent to the theatre, to take advantage of – or at least play off – this chaos, Plewman says he had signs placed around the theatre as one came into the building, warning about bomb craters and pointing the way towards the bomb shelter (the actual venue) – all written in faux German. Or, as he says about an experience and a challenge like that, “You must use what you’ve got!”

While he has been delighted over his continuing success in the world of theatre, he laments the growing absence of local theatrical venues around the city; the disappearance of those theatrical “angels” of an earlier era who supported the form because they loved it; and the growing need to find works that will pull people into the theatre – works that speak to audiences in their current lives. As he says, “We have to revive or rejuvenate the idea that the arts are important, not a particular agenda or ideology, just the arts… On their own merit, art is a reflection and a commentary of men and women’s souls. If we deny that fact and all we have is politics…” And his voice trails off into a moment of reflection.

About the magic of the art form, he recalls a famous actor he once met who had said to Plewman about his own career and experience, “I learned from a man who learned from a man who learned from a man who learned from a man who learned from Shakespeare.” That’s history – and a real sense of connection. More prosaically, perhaps, but even more usefully, Plewman says his friend Rex Garner once advised him always to keep in mind first principles: “Learn your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.” DM

– – – – – – – –

Defending the Caveman will be at the Theatre of Marcellus (at the Emperor’s Palace) on 27 and 28 March. Then it is on to the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, the Hilton Festival, Grahamstown, Durban, and then, finally, back in Johannesburg at the Victory Theatre in November.

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