Lee-Ann van Rooi — Laying a legacy

style="font-weight: 400;">After the Hunt. The issue revolved around whether the film did not perhaps “undermine the feminist movement” by “reviving old arguments” concerning the legitimacy of women’s accusations of sexual assault.

Provocative and probing, the film features Roberts as a philosophy professor who must take a stand when a student, her protégé, mounts allegations of sexual assault against one of her colleagues.

The journalist suggested that perhaps the movie took the cause of feminism backwards, reversing advances made during the #MeToo era.

Roberts, in her wisdom, responded that if the film manages to raise such questions, it is doing its job.

“Trouble’s where the juicy stuff is,” she told the reporter. “There’s a lot of old arguments that get rejuvenated in this movie in a way that does create conversation.”

The actor also made the point that it is healthy to feel intellectually provoked as an extension of our emotional range, rather than responding to intellectual challenges in a purely cerebral way.

Guadagnino addressed the issue, too: “It’s not about making a manifesto to revive old-fashioned values. The idea of the movie is that we are looking at people in their truths. Everyone has their own truths – it’s not that one truth is more important than another.”

The film, which attempts to rip the plaster off the subject of cancel culture, does indeed deal with tricky issues, and presents its discourse not by offering easy answers or by navigating within morally safe – or obvious – waters. It’s more sophisticated and thoughtful than that and instead problematises its issues, presses the audience to talk, debate and have original thoughts and – more importantly, perhaps – feelings about the film.

“We’re kind of losing the art of conversation in humanity right now,” Roberts said. “If making this movie does anything, getting everybody to talk to each other is the most exciting thing that I feel we could accomplish.”

This confrontation between a journalist and an Oscar-winning actor put me in mind of an interview I once read with Cape Town actor and theatre-maker Lee-Ann van Rooi. It was in response to her performance in the play The Woman Who Fed the Dogs, about the former wife of child abductor, rapist and murderer Marc Dutroux. Dubbed “the most hated woman in Belgium”, the woman had been convicted of aiding and abetting her husband; during her trial, details of her own abuse had surfaced.

Van Rooi had taken on the play and the role after “retiring” from acting, but felt compelled by the challenge of the play – and its potential to ask hard-hitting questions – to perform in it. She was drawn to the play as a means of meaningfully exploring the notion that monsters are created by other monsters – and at the same time grappling with the deeply complicated theme of abuse as part of a complex cycle.

When asked why the play did not take a more condemnatory stance against the character she’d played, Van Rooi said her duty as an actor was not to pass judgement on the character, but rather to play the truth of a woman who had herself been abused as a child.

In other words, the play is about ideas – and putting those ideas out there in the world for the audience to ponder, grapple with, reflect on, discuss and debate. It’s this notion of story as a source of discourse – and as a potential mechanism of healing – that appeals to Van Rooi.

It’s what presumably has lingered with her ever since she fell in love with reading as a young girl.

Teacher, mother, mentor

Van Rooi’s Instagram bio lists her as “Creatrix. Story doula. Concept farmer. Freedom facilitator”, though even these multiple descriptors barely scratch the surface.

Never mind the fact that she has, aside from her stage performances, theatre directing, film roles and extensive television experience, dabbled widely and generously within an extravagant variety of related and unrelated professions and side hustles. She mentions in her potted resumé, adventures in the travel industry, working as a personal assistant to high-powered business folk, jewellery design, and she is – perhaps at the heart of it all – a teacher.

She has also spent time abroad, at one point abandoning theatre entirely, only to return with what can only be described as accumulated vigour and verve, and with an industriousness second-to-none.

Plus, she’s a mom, and there’s an extensive list of people who are not related to her by blood who’ve nonetheless benefited from her rather selfless mentorship.

She is first and foremost an artist, however. And she – like Julia Roberts and Luca Guadagnino – believes her job as a storyteller is to open conversations and expand consciousness. This is achieved not by providing answers, handing down judgements or drawing conclusions, but by posing questions – and doing so as openly and truthfully as possible.

It’s why theatre is one of her superpowers – because it’s a place where she and the artists she works with can experience the most intimate connection with audiences.

While she’s perhaps more widely known for her film and television work, she says that theatre’s great benefit is that it provides greater capacity for the artists involved to control the story. Film, she says, can reach the masses, but often only after a lengthy period of development and the myriad impositions, interferences and fiddling by producers, studios and other forces. By the time a film is seen, the story might have slipped from the grasp of those who were telling it.

Plus, she says, there’s something about the realness of theatre, the physical proximity of a community of people – an audience in a shared environment – working together to parse the meaning of a story, that is not only thrilling, but feels as if it’s where the most meaningful connections can be made.

The importance of stories is a hangover from her growing up in a reading obsessed household and as a girl having her nose permanently between the pages of a book. She says that it was in the context of being a voracious reader that her other “superpowers” became apparent: an ability to be very quiet, to listen, and to be “awake” to the experience of the world.

While Van Rooi does still (occasionally) act, she says that it is something she will need to increasingly do less of, perhaps stop altogether. Not because it’s something she no longer loves, but because acting demands a deep – and often inward – investment of time, and it’s time that necessarily takes her away from the other work she is committed to investing so much of her energy into: directing and creating new work.

She also says that, as she starts to focus more deeply and intensely on her latest acting role – alongside Brendon Daniels in Boesman en Lena, an Afrikaans translation of the celebrated Athol Fugard play directed by Christo Davids – she will probably “not sleep a wink” for at least three weeks as she burrows deep into the project. Such is the extent to which she needs to properly understand the truth of the character she’ll embody as she rehearses in advance of Aardklop, where the play debuts in early October.

And, she says, there’ll likely be the inevitable “differences of opinion” with her director over lines that don’t necessarily ring true, not the way they’ve been written.

Yes, even Fugard.

It’s scrutiny Van Rooi believes is part of her job as an actor – being completely truthful to the character, and having total respect for the people represented on stage.

She says that in her career, which has spanned the better part of three decades, there have been enough times when she’s sucked it up, spoken lines she might not have been convinced about or considered inadequate or inaccurate reflections of the community being portrayed.

She no longer has the stomach for it.

Besides, her intention is to leave a legacy of telling stories honestly and truthfully – it’s a legacy she wants to create so that brown-skinned people such as herself feel represented, seen.

She says that one of the great powers of theatre is that it shows you who you really are. In a sense it has also shown Van Rooi what she’s had to do in order to accomplish her goals as an artist: to create work that is not only fulfilling for herself, but that can also effectively contribute to the wellbeing of other actors, and be a force of good for theatregoers and for her community.

In her gut she believes that by listening quietly and carefully, and being wide awake in the world and open enough to let the truth find, art itself can and will flow through her.

Van Rooi’s journey from performer to director and theatre-maker came as much out of frustration as out of necessity. There was a long period of having to explain herself and her culture to directors who do not share her culture. And, more often than not, those directors were men. At some point, she realised that, since there were no women directors who looked like her, none who could truly understand her culture, she would need to step up and become that person herself.

She also became increasingly aware of the lack of truly meaningful roles and texts being written for people who look like her; she realised that in order for those parts and those plays to exist, she would need to make them happen. So she became the sort of theatre-maker she’d been searching for.

That legacy she’s laying down has nothing to do with ego or celebrity or fame, and everything to do with creating forward momentum: forging an environment in which brown people are respectfully represented, their stories meaningfully and responsibly told. It’s not merely about broadening the scope of representation, but exploring a multiplicity of stories in all their complexity.

The key? Choosing only work that she finds fulfilling and, in the pursuit of authenticity and truth, striving to create work that is theatrically “beautiful”. Beauty, she says, is an essential ingredient – that essence or element in a work that makes it captivating in some way. Even within the mess and chaos, beauty can exist – it is the ingredient that gives an audience cause to look and listen.

And it should give them something to take away with them once the show is over. Much as the new Julia Roberts movie has given journalists a philosophical problem to chew on.

“What isn’t beautiful is when I watch a show and have nothing to say, except maybe ‘Goodbye!’ as I hurry to get out of the theatre,” she says.

She does not make work for herself, but for the audience – it is in the act of sharing the experience with a community of spectators that healing starts to happen. She believes that if she is open and honest in her approach to the work, and if the actors show up with integrity and accountability, then the art will work its magic, drawing the audience into a sense of communion – a ritual, if you like.

Rituals of healing

You can experience this sense of being drawn into an intimate relationship with the story and its characters in Van Rooi’s production of Kompoun, a hard-hitting two-hander based on the novel by Ronelda Kamfer which debuted at Suidoosterfees in Cape Town, showed at the National Arts Festival in June and which can be seen at Woordfees in Stellenbosch in October.

In Kompoun, there is no fourth wall at all, the audience instead seated in a circle around the performance space, ensuring that everyone is close to the action. There’s an intimacy, a vibration, an energetic impulse. And there’s the physical reality of seeing the rest of the audience. There is no escaping a sense of being part of something, of experiencing this play and many of its hard truths as a collective – and as a community.

In this sense, the very staging of the play itself underscores its themes of speaking up, speaking out, of stating the problem in front of the world in order to let go and escape the perceived shackles of the past.

Also vital for Van Rooi is using theatre as a way of breaking new ground, offering ways of telling stories that are compelling, original and fresh. At the heart of her production of Kompoun is an approach to the material that jolts the audience out of its comfort zone, asks us to connect with the performers, who are right there and looking directly into our eyes so there is no illusion that the characters and the traumas being spoken about are anything less than real.

Among her “causes”, if that’s the right word, is to broaden the scope of stories being told in theatre about brown-skinned people. She says that while there has been a proliferation of stories centred on Cape Town’s “urban” tropes (with Cape Flats gangsters and drug-related violence, for example), she’s interested in bringing to the stage more stories from the Northern Cape.

To make this happen, Van Rooi last year asked the poet Lynthia Julius to consider turning her acclaimed poetry collection, Kinderlê, into a play text.

Kinderlê takes its name (which translates roughly as “child’s rest”) from a memorial at Steinkopf in the Northern Cape; the monument was established to commemorate 32 Nama children who, along with their minders and their dogs, were massacred during a raid in 1867. It happened on a Sunday, while the children’s parents were at church, and while the event is well known to people from the area, it’s a barely remembered part of history elsewhere.

Having met Julius in April last year, Van Rooi had the first draft of a text she could begin working with by September. She encouraged Julius to give it shape, fill in the characters, and open up space for dialogue.

“It’s the most beautiful story,” Van Rooi says, in spite of the terrible tragedy that serves as its backbone.

While it uses an act of brutal and terrible killing as the backdrop, its themes cover an array of issues including gender, the erotic, miscarriage and the vulnerability of children.

Van Rooi says, ultimately, it is about infidelity – and, crucially, about the fact that it is always children who seem destined to inherit and face the consequences of various unspoken and unresolved traumas. Debuting at Woordfees in October, the new play presents a novel – and beautiful – way of working through some of these issues.

Included in the production are 32 rocks borrowed from the place where the story is set. Van Rooi says that once the show has completed its journey, the rocks will be returned to the site, but it felt apt to include some physical manifestation of the memory of those children who were killed. Also apt is that in the cast is actor Miché Cloete, who is from Steinkopf, and who may very well be related to children who are buried at the memorial site.

Van Rooi says she anticipates it being a long while before the stones are returned to the site. She hopes that Kinderlê will, after Woordfees and other festivals, tour small towns across the Northern Cape, and that the people who see it in those places will feel respected, communicated with truthfully, so that meaningful conversations are started.

She wants her work to leave us wondering, craving more, curious. She wants theatre to open our hearts, expand possibilities. Because that’s where healing happens. DM

Kompoun, Boesman en Lena and Kinderlê are all funded by the Festival Enterprise Catalyst, which provides financial support for theatre projects to enable them to enjoy an extended life, especially at arts festivals across the country. Boesman en Lena will be performed at Aardklop in Potchefstroom (7–11 October). It will also be performed at Woordfees in Stellenbosch (11–19 October), where Kompoun and Kinderlê can also be seen.