Elegant storytelling with wonderful music, David Kramer’s ‘Ver in die wêreld Kittie’ is activism you can tap your toes to

Ver In Die Wêreld Kittie, written and Directed by David Kramer (Picture: Mark Wessels)

By Keith Bain

3 Aug 2024

See it for the nostalgia, for a story properly told, for its four gorgeous actors and the trio of musicians making magic at the back of the stage. And see it for that special way David Kramer has of scratching at the surface to reveal a deeper truth.

We’d be a lot poorer, culturally, were it not for David Kramer. He has dedicated much of his life to bringing untold stories to light, transforming hidden histories and undiscovered truths into shows that are not only entertaining, but important.

He is as much a composer, musician, crafter of tales and theatre-maker as he is a keen-eared ethnologist who has, through his love of musicianship and his curiosity about where our music comes from, helped elevate cultural traditions that might otherwise have been lost. Without him, so much of who we are as a people might have disappeared from the cultural landscape.

Dean Balie in Ver in die wêreld Kittie. (Picture: Mark Wessels)

My head was filled with this realisation – of Kramer’s value to South Africa and his importance as a cultural icon – while watching his musical, Ver in die wêreld Kittie, for the second time. It was an expanded, improved, reinvigorated, edited and more polished version of the show which debuted at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival last April; it’s since picked up awards, accolades and standing ovations at various festivals. And now, in its more fleshed out iteration, it’s playing at The Blik, a freshly minted theatre, in Epping of all places, at the Paradise Hawkers Market.

The musical is a period piece spanning several decades and several continents. It is also an interweaving of multiple story threads.

On the one hand, it is about a privileged white South African musician (played with a kind of subversive “niceness” by the excellent André Terblanche) who sets out to find his fortune overseas and achieves just that with his good looks, charm and ready supply of appropriated folk songs.

In the UK, this man, born Joseph Pessach, opts to hide his Jewishness by rebranding himself Josef Marais. He leans into his “exoticness” and begins to make a name for himself as a singer of folk tales from the African bush. Later, having relocated to New York, he falls in love with a Jewish refugee, Rosa de Miranda (a delightful performance by Jenny Stead who sings beautifully and leans into her character’s Amsterdam accent to great comic effect), who has fled Europe at the time of Hitler’s rise to power.

André Terblanche in Ver in die wêreld Kittie. (Picture: Mark Wessels)

They become a successful husband-and-wife music sensation who, in the 40s, 50s and 60s, toured the US and Europe performing primarily tunes based around English translations of African folk songs.

What goes almost entirely unacknowledged is that Marais had essentially lifted the songs and stories from an illiterate yet musically gifted farmworker. In the show, he is kind of a minstrel character, a self-taught musician named Koos Heuningbek, and it’s the traditional ballads he sings that Marais ends up passing off as his own.

While Koos achieves marginal success at home, Marais’ wily ambitions earn him significant fame in the US – there are scenes alluding to the ways in which he and Miranda hobnobbed with big-name movie stars and how some of the folk songs he adapted into English became huge hits. One of those big-name triumphs was “Sugar Bush” which Doris Day and Frankie Laine sent up the charts in 1952. Its precursor, appropriated by Marais, was “Suikerbossie”.

All all-too-familiar story

It’s an all-too-familiar story in which the privileged profit off the backs of the poor and downtrodden.

That’s where the David Kramer magic touch comes in. He uses the musical to shine a light on Koos Heuningbek, casting him as the true hero of the story. It’s not for nothing that his surname means “honey mouth”; his singing is beautiful – sweet and captivating, and straight from the heart.

Dean Balie and Rushney Ferguson in Ver In Die wêreld Kittie, written and Directed by David Kramer (Picture: Mark Wessels)

Kramer says his shows are a result of personal curiosity, a need to dig deep and find out more.

“It’s part of a process of trying to understand,” he says. “The songs I write are answers to the questions I ask myself. Hopefully within my songs, I’m also raising questions.”

Kramer may, on one level, be busy with a kind of intellectual discourse, an interrogation of the implications and lasting legacy of cultural appropriation, but what you feel in your gut and in your heart is the love he has for salt-of-the-earth people. In Ver in die wêreld Kittie, that character is Koos Heuningbek. Immensely talented, with a dream in his heart and a song in his soul, he may not achieve the limelight sought by Josef Marais, but he certainly captures our imagination.

Much of that has to do with an enchanting performance by Dean Balie who is an absolute powerhouse of musical virtuosity, presence, comedy and pathos. In the show, he also does the occasional cameo as another character, using a wig and an American accent and a bit of full-body razzmatazz to transform into someone completely distinct from Koos, but no less dazzling to watch.

Cheesy cliché

At its heart, Ver in die wêreld Kittie is also a love story. For one thing, there’s the slightly cheesy cliché of a disadvantaged woman, Kittie (played with tremendous dignity by Rushney Ferguson), who is jilted by a man whose desire for fame and fortune outweighs his moral fortitude. It’s a trope that’s turned on its head as the story to some extent becomes hers to tell, and her dream is the one that’s eventually realised in unexpected ways.

Ver In Die Wêreld Kittie, written and Directed by David Kramer (Picture: Mark Wessels)

But the real love affair here is Kramer’s lifelong romance with music, and specifically with the kind of folk music produced by the minstrel-balladeers who have long been an inspirational force in Kramer’s work and who are represented here by Koos Heuningbek.

Ver in die wêreld Kittie is elegant storytelling with wonderful music. It’s history, it’s nostalgia, it’s politics, it’s an exposé, and it’s a tale as old as time. It’s also funny in places and at times achingly sad; that lump in your throat and tears down your cheeks aren’t accidental, they’re engineered by someone who, thanks to decades of experience telling stories through music, knows how to use a haunting melody to quietly break your heart. DM

David Kramer’s Ver in die wêreld Kittie plays at The Blik at the Paradise Hawkers Market (110 Gunner’s Circle) in Epping, Cape Town, over weekends only, until 10 August. The venue is easy to reach, well signposted and has loads of parking and friendly security. Tickets available on WebTickets.

Categories:

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

South Africa

All all-too-familiar story

Cheesy cliché