the shooting gallery
This year’s National Arts Festival was thankfully not lacking in controversy. Catherine Henegan’s multimedia production,The Shooting Gallery, divided audiences like no other – some walked out, some gave standing ovations, others sat in stunned silence long after the play had ended. Woven loosely around the story of the war journalists Kevin Carter and Ken Osterbroek, the play gouged at the unhappy divide between the grim reality of world events, and the media’s profane hunger for these events as sensation-generators – ‘if it bleeds, it leads’.
The lead was acted by radical literary figure Aryan Kaganof, who spent much of his time suspended naked and upside-down before a huge screen, while images of the globe’s violent conflicts were projected into him. He went on to smear himself with blood and crawl through the audience, leaping up to answer a call on his cellphone, from his mother. This was strong theatre, though too disjointed to fully realise its potential. But The Shooting Gallery was a worthy addition to the festival, and shame on the South African newspaper that slated it in their review, saying ‘We South Africans just want to be entertained’.
david bannister
this review originally appeared in scene 4 magazine
photo suzy bernstein
for an extremely concise but detailed overview of the shooting gallery, reviews, responses etc, please click here
Leave a Reply