From shyness to the stage, Wilhelm van der Walt explores identity through powerful performances

“I don’t know if introverts are born or made,” said actor Wilhelm van der Walt. “In my case, I was from a very young age carrying a lot of emotion and feelings and keeping it all to myself.”

It was a couple of days after his 41st birthday, and as good a time as any to reflect on what makes us who we are, and to discuss what it might be that gives someone who identifies as “very shy” the capacity to appear on a stage in front of hundreds of strangers and reveal so much of himself. 

“When you’re 10 years old, you don’t realise you’re carrying all that stuff,” he said. “But, in retrospect, that’s what was happening. There was no platform, nor did I have any tools to project it outwards, or explore it.”

If only he’d discovered acting earlier in life. 

Then again, had he found that outlet sooner, released all that bottled up “stuff”, he might not be the actor he is today. Such is the paradox of being human: we never can tell what makes us who we are. Perhaps it’s why Van der Walt, among the best South African actors of his generation, has such a strong affinity for theatre that provides insight into who we are — he likes to be involved with shows that help us more clearly “see” and understand one another.

Watch Van der Walt perform and it’s not shyness you see, of course, but a deep well of empathy, a capacity to step into the shoes of his characters and embody their deepest truths. Plus there’s his combination of magnetism, skill, emotional deftness and a quality you might describe as “quiet intensity”, something that will quite likely at some point in the performance absolutely take your breath away. Never mind his ability to not only hold an audience’s attention, but keep large crowds riveted, hanging on his every word. 

At some point, too, he’ll probably have them lapsing into tears.

When I saw him in his latest play, Seun, incidentally his first one-man show, at an arts festival in Bloemfontein in July, what also distinguished his performance was a luminosity. It was visible in his dextrous humanity — his capacity to pour light into dark places while illuminating the most intimate details of his character. 

In Seun, adapted by Johann Smith from Dana Snyman’s memoir of the 1980s, Van der Walt plays an apartheid-era army conscript who gets diagnosed with schizophrenia and is discharged — back into a confounding patriarchal society where a messy political reality and a mass of social expectations heighten the sense of an ominous world around him.

Magically, it’s a world conjured almost entirely by words. Director Nico Scheepers opts to keep the production minimal, the set comprising just a table and chair and some tiny toy soldiers. And yet, Van der Walt’s excavation into the truth of each word and every moment seems to make the world and other characters around him come alive, too.

“I’m just invested in the story with my whole being,” he said. “And that’s the result, I guess. It’s not something I’m in control of, it’s just me kind of trying to find a way to tell you this story…” 

Van der Walt so brilliantly and authentically channels the spirit of that lost young man — the seun (“son” or “boy”) of the title — and he wedges his way into the audience’s collective hearts with such tenderness and ease. Emotionally, it’s a huge role, and yet he compresses all of the character’s intensity into a performance so immaculately contained and clear that it’s impossible to take your eyes off him. As an actor, he is — there’s no other word for it — lovely. As in: he makes you fall in love with the character.

Overcome by a desire to give up

And yet, as much as his performance has an almost palpable weight, the actor says when it first opened at Innibos, an arts festival in Nelspruit, a couple of weeks earlier, he’d been overcome by an intense desire to give up.

“When we opened Seun in Nelspruit — in a 400-seat theatre — it was quite intense. The biggest part of your brain knows what you have to do and it knows what’s going to happen. But there’s obviously also this part of your brain that goes ‘I don’t know what the fuck’s going to happen. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ And I was thinking of the worst-case scenarios.”

Van der Walt says that if he hadn’t already racked up 15 years of experience as an actor, he’d have walked off stage. 

“Five minutes in, I was ready to just wave at the audience, say ‘I’m sorry’, and leave.”

He says he was struck by “an overwhelming” sense of being alone on stage, of his shyness making him uncomfortable in much the same way that he finds having to emcee at a wedding “f*****g stressful”.

He was saved, though, by his “acting muscle”, by that realisation that he knew what to do and possessed the capacity to get it done. And so he did. And he got through Innibos and also through performances in Bloemfontein (which brought a different kind of stress, because it’s where he grew up, where his family and friends are, where he first fell in love with theatre, and where he studied acting).

Seun, which has as a central theme the relationship between its young narrator and his conservative father, is one of two plays exploring vexed father-son relationships that Van der Walt will be starring in at Aardklop, Potchefstroom’s annual arts festival, in early October. 

The other, Stinkhout (which translates as “stinkwood” and refers to a tree that’s a physical and metaphoric presence in the play), is a two-hander alongside veteran actor Frank Opperman. They’d been working on a TV programme together when a make-up artist happened to mention how similar the two actors look. It sparked an idea: to commission a play in which they could explore this imaginary father-son relationship.

A ‘deep soul’

To create the text, they approached acclaimed playwright Philip Rademeyer, whom Van der Walt describes as a “deep soul”; Rademeyer, who also directed Stinkhout, crafted a script which has earned awards for everyone involved. It was named best production at Aardklop, where it debuted last year; more recently, it earned Van der Walt a best actor “Kanna” award at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival in Oudtshoorn in April.

In it, Van der Walt plays a young man who returns to South Africa after living abroad for 11 years, reuniting with his father on the family plot after his younger brother is found dead under the same majestic tree (on stage it’s composed of knotted ropes strung with light bulbs) in which the boys’ mother years before had hanged herself.

“The play is so close to home, a true passion project,” Van der Walt says. 

“It’s not necessarily me and my dad’s story, but rather an exploration of an emotional landscape that, in a way, I’m longing to have with my dad. I’ve been with it since before its creation, and working with a writer who writes so very deeply from his soul makes it very special.”

He describes Rademeyer as another “very shy guy” and a “genius” with a “genuine connection to some muscle that really understands behaviour and emotion and dramatic action”.

“He writes from a really deep and very personal place, and it does seem that he draws from a well that runs deeper than most. He’s got this inner world that’s like the Niagara Falls — this insane amount of water that just keeps gushing.”

Emotionally, he says working on Stinkhout was “blood and guts and balls to the wall”.

Van der Walt last year lost a dear friend who drank himself to death, and in the play his character’s brother dies by way of a heroin overdose. 

“So there were a lot of emotions going into the play, even before we began rehearsing. It was quite intense — I was crying during the first week of rehearsals.”

He says, too, that turning 40 last August also seemed to activate in him a new capacity for accessing truth. 

“It feels like a lot of stuff ticked over for me. I was really able to open myself up on stage so there was just no faking it. I felt my friend who had died. And I felt my dad.”

Van der Walt describes his relationship with his own father as “tricky, but not bad”.

What’s perhaps a little heartbreaking, though, is the sense of a gulf that exists that is quite likely a fundamental issue in many, if not all, father-son relationships — the struggle to communicate “more deeply”.

“There is love, maybe unspoken love, but there’s a level — or a deeper kind of relationship — one wants to forge,” Van der Walt says. “And it’s not necessarily possible any more because my father’s almost 80 now — and neither of us necessarily has the vocabulary required for us to speak to each other in a certain way. I could be wrong, but I don’t see any kind of way of developing that vocabulary because if we open that ‘thing’ up now, it’ll be too big, too overwhelming.”

For Van der Walt, Stinkhout has been therapeutic, and has afforded him the opportunity to work though some of that emotional overwhelm. It’s part of a process of healing that is often part of the reward of storytelling and theatre. 

“I want to be part of projects that help people understand each other better because I believe we’re here to help one another get through this human experience — and to do that, we need to understand each other first,” he says.

“Not to sound esoteric, but it’s as though each play I do is a chance to deal with stuff I need to deal with right now — at this specific point in my life. It’s crazy how every broken character or every kind of character that needed some kind of investigation in his life really reflected something I’ve needed to look at in my own life. Each character I’ve played has come along in order to help me better understand something about myself.”

Alone on stage

While Stinkhout was, in this respect, a chance to work through aspects of his relationship with his own father, Seun has been about embracing an aspect of his own vulnerability: being alone on stage for the duration of a show.

“A lot of it is terrifying,” he says of the overwhelm he feels when performing entirely alone in Seun. “But then there’s a lot of freedom that comes with feeling in control and knowing that I’m the magician of the show.”

It’s the feelings that bubble up before every performance that still freak him out, and he works hard to keep his nerves under control, to stay calm. He has a routine, including spending some time on seat 8 (his favourite number) in row H (the eighth row) and running through the play in his head from the audience’s perspective. It’s all about staying calm and feeling relaxed before it’s time to go on, he says. 

“Still, for half an hour before every show I’m like, ‘Oh f***, I’m just going to become an estate agent and start selling houses!’”

Rest assured, that is never going to happen. Van der Walt says he’s too far gone, too deep into his love affair with acting to ever contemplate doing anything else. 

“I’m kind of at an age now where there’s no turning back. I’m not going to become a teacher or an estate agent.”

He says, too, that he wants to know that the work he does has meaning beyond himself. As much as each role has been a kind of healing journey for his own spirit, he also believes that every production he takes on is capable of touching audiences in profound and positive ways.

“There’s always that clichéd idea that art’s a mirror to society and we artists want to change people’s lives — and we want to change people’s minds,” he says. 

For Van der Walt, the cliché absolutely holds true. “I’m an actor,” he says. “I’m a vessel for communicating ideas to people, so that hopefully we can understand each other better.” DM

Wilhelm van der Walt will perform in Stinkhout at Aardklop, an arts festival in Potchefstroom, 7-12 October. At Aardklop, he can also be seen in his one-man show, Seun, which will also travel to Woordfees in Stellenbosch later in the month, 11-19 October.