Cairns Can Do No Wrong

It’s official: I’ll see anything James Cairns is in. The man is astoundingly talented and I can’t say enough good things about his performances. With Sie Weiss Alles, I can add his writing to the mix too.

Despite being happy to see Cairns even if he were reciting extracts from the OED, it was a particular pleasure to watch him perform Sie Weiss Alles for the second time after seeing it at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival in 2011, where it deservedly won a Silver Ovation Award. It is an absolute gem of a script, being nuanced, multi-layered and very, very clever.

Set at the end of World War Two, the play opens with the intriguing tableau of an intimate scene between an SS Officer and a young German woman. Faced with the certainty of an imminent and brutal death at the hands of the encroaching Russian army, fate has thrown into the captain’s interrogation room a woman from his past, brought in for questioning when her father disappears under suspicious circumstances that smack of American defection. Now, he is faced with an endgame of impossible choices. They both have nothing to lose and everything to play for. And so they begin.

The script is beautifully crafted, working on multiple levels of meaning as the pair pass the time by becoming actors in their own version of Hamlet. This act becomes a complex means of negotiating trust, of sizing up and testing boundaries, as they tread the textual line that spans more than just the physical distance between Denmark and Germany. In the drama of the high stakes games they are engaging in, truth is up for grabs to the best performer.

At once witty, clever and deeply disturbing, the play is a complex, beautifully crafted expression of human need, the meaning of acting a role, the high stakes of trust. A war story with a difference, the two-hander is brought beautifully to life by the tight direction of Tamara Guhrs and riveting performances by the actors.

Cairns will blow you away with his understated desperation, his portrait of a man at the end of his rope. It would be so easy for this piece to sink into melodrama, but he paints with such nuance that one believes the character absolutely. Taryn Bennett carried the action extremely well as a woman dexterously treading the line between truth and desire, safety and honesty.

The play-within-a-play element sees both actors having to act the slow building of meaning in the process of acting and, despite the multiple rehearsal scenes this entailed, I was riveted throughout. It is a testament to their performances that not one beat was missed, the tension never wavered and, despite some technical interference on opening night, the pair effortlessly held the audience in the palm of their hand throughout.

Go and treat yourself to the best piece of new South African writing I’ve seen in a long time. Sie Weiss Alles is a tour de force of local talent.