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Andrew Buckland and his theatre of full-body empathy

Andrew Buckland and his theatre of full-body empathy
Andrew Buckland concedes that he has had to make some adjustments to his performance in The Ugly Noo Noo since the 1980s. (Photo: Bevan Davis)
Keith Bain
By Keith Bain
1 Aug 2024
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Andrew Buckland revisits his 1980s’ production The Ugly Noo Noo – a play about the kind of inordinate response of a human towards a harmless insect, which subliminally interrogated the wayward politics of the time.

Andrew Buckland is addicted. His drug – not merely of choice, but of necessity – is other people’s laughter. He gets his highs in other ways, too. Principally, by creating theatrical performances in which humans can practice empathy, a skill he believes requires regular exercise. 

“Theatre is one of the most effective ways for us to practise empathy,” he says. “It’s an absolute survival skill for our species. Without theatre, we would be in trouble because it teaches us to imagine someone else’s perspective.” 

Buckland, who turned 70 in February, has been a seminal force in South African theatre since the 1980s. Versatile though he is as a performer, his major contribution has been in the realm of physical theatre, a form that “asks the audience to imagine so much”, to see what isn’t even there. 

Simple example: an actor runs across the stage, feigning tremendous effort, then collides with an imaginary wall, yells out upon “impact”, falls backwards and whimpers in a dramatic expression of pain and defeat. In the audience, we feel it in our bodies, so that even though our brains know there is no wall, that the actor isn’t injured, we’re able to empathise with the character’s experience. Buckland says it’s because the physical performance “evokes a real visceral sensation” without need for intellectual interference. 

Buckland, who grew up in Zimbabwe, remembers play-acting early on. There were the hours spent beating up the cushions, cowboy fights with soft furnishings, enacting TV heroes like the Lone Ranger and Captain Kirk from Star Trek to keep himself entertained. At school, he found peer acceptance by “telling jokes and stories, performing and being a clown”. Then, while at Rhodes University to study accounting, fate landed him in the drama department where he revelled in classical mime techniques, including the French white-face tradition, which often meant performing solo. Out of that developed the physical form he became associated with and which he has honed throughout his prolific career. 

Becoming the other


Most recently, Buckland performed in Unruly, a show directed by Neil Coppen that’s designed to help audiences work through the impact of living in proximity to baboons that frequent Cape Town’s Deep South. In it, Buckland plays multiple characters in a story centred on a man swept up by escalating baboon politics after the matriarch of a local troop mysteriously disappears. It premiered in June and played in a number of baboon-visited neighbourhoods. Performances were followed by audience conversations about the impacts of baboons and about the relationships we humans have with nature. The idea in part has been to encourage people to see the other side of the story, to understand how others – people and baboons – feel about an issue that’s been massively divisive. 

Animal politics isn’t new to Buckland. He was, in 1988, the first person to play a Parktown prawn on stage. He did so in The Ugly Noo Noo, a groundbreaking one-man physical comedy show about a man’s relationship with the much-maligned critter, which is neither a prawn nor a cockroach, but in fact the African king cricket (or tusked king cricket, Libanasidus vittatus). His play rather counterintuitively urged audiences to empathise with the infamous insect. And to laugh at the same time.

The Ugly Noo Noo originated from observing his theatre director wife overreacting to a bug in their Joburg home. “It was my watching Janet absolutely lose it with a Parktown prawn. The disparity between her level of reaction to it and the nature of this little insect, which is, I guess, scary. But she absolutely lost it. And it seemed so funny because it was just so out of the appropriate range of behavioural response... Through Janet I felt the sheer panic that hits you even though it’s just this little harmless insect... 

“And then I would hear stories from so many people. Mention ‘Parktown prawn’ and every Joburger would say, ‘Oh my God, they’re so disgusting!’ And there were all these myths: ‘They’re vicious! They’re poisonous! They can kill you with that sting!’ At that time in Joburg, they were rife. So it’s like in Cape Town’s Deep South today, where, if you say the word ‘baboon’, everyone’s got a baboon story. At that time, everyone had a Parktown prawn story.”

Buckland’s talent for empathy was fired up by an interest in imagining the prawn’s side of the story. “What if that little creature coming into the house had utterly innocent intentions?”

He wrote some dialogue between a human and an insect after, having researched it, he discovered it was completely harmless. “It can’t hurt you, can’t bite you, can’t sting you. It’s built to terrify you with the way it looks – that’s how he defends himself.”

Buckland also conducted more direct research. “I got two prawns and put them in glass bottles, just like the human in the play does. I kept them next to my bed, fed them and watched them to try to get inside their little insect heads. 

“And the more I did, the more they seemed to ask the same question, ‘Why are you keeping me in this bottle?’ And begging m,: ‘Please let me get back to foraging!’.”

From a few lines of dialogue and a late-night slot at The Market Theatre, Buckland wrote the rest of the play in about three weeks. He says responses were incredibly visceral. “You could just feel entire audiences reliving their own experiences with a prawn. How they’d faced these things, had them in their homes, caught in their hair or in their shoes.”

Politics of fear


But Buckland’s show was about more than human-insect relations. He says there was an innate connection between how these misunderstood insects being held captive in a glass bottle might have been feeling and the socio-political situation in the country at the height of apartheid. 

It felt clear to him, without having to stretch the idea too far, that the lack of dialogue between the two parties – human and insect – mirrored the apartheid government’s refusal to talk to the ANC.

He says he was struck by the parallels between the irrational fear of the other that his human character was expressing and the fear response of the apartheid government. “And the only reaction from the government to that fear was violence. Immediate and very strong violence. The mirror seemed to me so obvious and so clear.” 

And so The Ugly Noo Noo, a play about the kind of inordinate response of a human towards a harmless insect, became a show that subliminally interrogated the wayward politics of the time.

He was interested in using theatre “to activate people, to wake audiences up, to spread the word or at least bring matters to light”. His need to make a difference in the world was “absolutely vital”, and as a physical performer, he possessed all the tools required to do that. “It just required a body going into the space and being with other people,” he says.

It was also clear to Buckland that the way to address these issues was through comedy. And so “laughing together” became the frame through which he encouraged audiences to consider those questions.

“As I set out to create The Ugly Noo Noo I had no idea that it was about all the things I now say it’s about. I was just playing a game with a man and a prawn. But in the doing of that, it manifested my own anxiety and fear and shame and guilt and all of those things. Without me thinking, ‘Okay, I must write a play about these things’. It’s essentially looking to the body as a source of the form and often the doing of it clarifies your thoughts. If you trust that those ideas are okay, then you allow the body to create the form for you. And out of that you realise what the piece is about.

“Part of the task of creating a show for an audience is to trust that those ideas are there without constantly thinking, ‘Is the question evident?’ I just concentrate on playing because that’s where we meet each other as humans.

“Hopefully in the hours after the show, those ideas come to the surface – because they are serious questions that we are inviting people to consider. But in the moment of performance the idea is really to feel rather than to think – and to allow the thoughts to emerge out of that feeling.”

Anti-fascist revival


Andrew Buckland Andrew Buckland concedes that he has had to make some adjustments to his performance in The Ugly Noo Noo since the 1980s. (Photo: Bevan Davis)



Recently, while putting ideas about his work down on paper, it occurred to Buckland that there are aspects of The Ugly Noo Noo that have powerful parallels with the rising tide of right-wing nationalism happening around the world right now. 

“It became clear that the fascist language in the text, which in the 1980s seemed so specific to South Africa, was the kind of language being used universally today, that it reflected what is happening to humanity right now. That gave me the kind of energy to consider that it’s not just a South African period piece from the 1980s, but may have relevance today.” 

Which is why reviving The Ugly Noo Noo in 2024 seems so appropriate. He believes the play contains universal truths about humans and their attitude to otherness, which he hopes will resonate with audiences today. “Whether it’s an insect or a baboon, or another race or our neighbours… Whatever it is, we’re very good at falling victim to our capacity to be afraid of that ‘other’ and then allowing that fear to turn into violence, whether it’s physical, psychological or emotional violence,” he says. 

“Fascism feeds on that fear, which is why we hear populist talk of it being ‘all the immigrants’ fault’ and ‘we’ve got to get rid of them’. The language of fascists often involves talking about vermin, calling the other names, like ‘cockroaches’. The dehumanising of the other is absolutely what happens to the noo noo in the play.” 

Being brave


“Not everyone can work in the performing arts,” Buckland says. “People get big ideas of stardom and movies. But it’s not for everyone. To be in this business you need to be courageous in that there will be times when you’ve got a blank page of ideas and a blank page in your diary. 

“I actively decided I’m going to be courageous. I needed to be brave in order to take this on. Because I don’t know what else I’d have been able to do with my life once I’d found my purpose in life. That made being brave much easier. Because I didn’t know what else I could do.”

So much of what Buckland has had a hand in has turned to gold. Whether he’s empathising with a baboon, becoming a noo noo, or whizzing around stage in the energetic play, Firefly, which he helped created in 2021, it’s easy to be struck by his youthfulness, his exuberance and physical dexterity, his full-body humour.

“I still feel young,” he says. “I get a shock when I look in the mirror, but I don’t feel my age. Essentially my body is not doing too badly, although I do have to make some adjustments in my performance now. When I first did The Ugly Noo Noo, I was wild with energy. Pumped up, sweating like crazy in the first 10 seconds. Pounding it out. 

“Reviving The Ugly Noo Noo requires some of that energy again. If my body can provide that, fantastic. As you get older, you also get cleverer, much more economical with energy. But I do still have fun, playing on stage. I creak in different places now, have peripheral neuropathy in my feet. So I do feel the differences that come with age, but essentially at the heart of it, it’s still the absolute passionate joy of play and sharing that play. And the addiction to other people’s laughter, which I suffer from.” DM

 The Ugly Noo Noo is at The Baxter in Cape Town until 10 August. It will transfer to Johannesburg’s Market Theatre from 15 August.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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