kagablog

Review
Tom Jasiukowicz

July 14, 2006…8AM…Israeli planes bomb Lebanon

July 14, 2006…8PM…The Shooting Gallery opens in Johannesburg

Johannesburg, South Africa, lies thousands of miles away from the war-zone of the Middle East. Yet…I am sitting in a theatre in this city confronted by the reality of this morning’s Israeli bombing attack on Beirut. I am in the front row of this darkened theatre - the Laager at The Market Theatre - feeling as if I have been transplanted to the front-line of the Middle East conflict.

This is contemporary, current, off-the-cuff real live theatre.

A huge screen forms part of the stage props on which the days’ headlines and vivid pictures from Reuters, The Star and other media keep rolling accompanied by sound bytes of gunshots, the anguished wails of people and eerie effects buzz around this theatre as if it were a bunker right-slap-bang-bang in the middle of any war-zone in the world.

The drama is The Shooting Gallery – a play being staged at The Market Theatre in Newtown, Johannesburg.

For 30 years, The Market Theatre has presented revolutionary drama to theatre-goers and none could be more revolutionary than The Shooting Gallery. Devised and directed by Catherine Henegan, who co-performs it with Aryan Kaganof, (the only actors in the drama). Kaganof’s character personifies what it means to be a photo-journalist/war-correspondent.

Catherine Henegan spends most of the play sitting behind her desk, in her role of a News Editor, behind an array of PC-equipment, punching away at the keypad and mouse - clicking the images that come up on the screen which confront the audience as if the screen itself were an actor involved in the play – perhaps involved in the way a camera is involved in a war – objective, detached, unquestioning and yet totally realistic.

What you see is what you get!

And it seemed to me that the screen overshadows the two people on stage. Because the vivid scenes of soldiers, rioters, guns, faces twisted in anguish and war-zones past and present serve as the focal point of the action of the drama.

The actors seemed to be almost secondary to the plot – what taking photos of a war is all about and what it does to the mind of a photo-journalist.

Aryan Kaganof spends most of the play paying homage to the great TV screen in his attempt to convey the demons and tortures that plague the mind of a war photographer. The conclusion I got from his portrayal is that taking shots of war scenes is not all fun and games. It is not sitting in front of the TV sipping coffee watching a war-movie. In a war-movie, the actors do not actually get shot, nor do the cameramen get shot or experience the stark reality of witnessing real blood being spilt.

In any war, violent attack, or even a crime scene standoff between the cops and the robbers…people die, bystanders get wounded in the cross-fire and even photographers get in the way of bullets.

In 1994, war-photographer Ken Oosterbroek died when a stray bullet hit him during the violence in Thokoza. Fellow photographers Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva wrote the book The Bang Bang Club (published by Random House in 2001) in which Marinovich describes various incidents in which he himself got wounded while taking pics of the violence which marked South Africa in the years leading up to the first democratic elections in 1994. Film footage of these scenes flash by on the big screen.

The Shooting Gallery was inspired by this book and I get the impression that Kaganof has based his portrayal on the nightmares and mental images of pain and anguish these photographers experienced in their documentation of the images of war on celluloid. In particular on the experiences of Kevin Carter, a member of this Bang Bang Club who committed suicide in 1994.

In the book, Greg Marinovich wonders: “why did we continue to do work that brought us so much guilt and pain?”

Can a photo-journalist whose days consist of documenting the deaths of countless victims and the anguish of bystanders and loved ones remain uninvolved, unemotional? Uncaring? Is he just doing a job to do to earn a living? What motivates photographers to work in the frontlines of battle-grounds? Is it the adrenalin rush they experience on hearing gunfire and the explosions of bombs? Is it a sense of telling-it-like-it-is because someone has to do it?

Can a war take place if no-one reports on it? Does war feed on the ensuing publicity in the media – in the press, on the TV screen – so that those watching it at home can be entertained by the spectacle of war?

Eventually, the self-realization hits home as Kaganof proclaims…that he… “collects frames”…that is all he does because…”the war feeds me”. Then he wakes up at his own funeral. Did Kevin Carter come to this conclusion? Was the reality too much for him to take?
The Shooting Gallery is real live off-the cuff theatre – the play is adapted to the circumstances of the world of any given day – and it will leave you asking a lot of questions…questions such as…why do we find the coverage of war so fascinating? Are war-correspondents simply feeding our insatiable hunger for our own entertainment?

this review originally appeared here
the shooting gallery runs at the market theatre until 6 august