The Borrow Pit is a kamishibai play by Jemma Kahn and is the commissioned work for the artist’s 2018 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Theatre. In July 2018, following its premiere at the National Arts Festival, The Borrow Pit was staged at The Centre for the Less Good Idea as part of the For Once programme.
How do you begin to make sense of a world dominated and influenced by hideous men? In The Borrow Pit, Kahn zeroes in on the lives of influential painters, philosophers, philanthropists and psychoanalysts from a bygone, albeit endure influential, era to posit that the artist-muse trope is a little more sinister than one might think.
Performed using a combination of stage acting, narration, sock-puppetry and the Japanese street theatre techniques of kamishibai, the play draws on historical facts and events from the lives of these painters and high-society members and adds in a healthy dose of humour and fiction in order to better translate it all.
The story begins in Paris, in the dark, smokey recesses of a gentlemen’s club where a group of important men stand around talking about important things, and where we meet the likes of Nietzche, Freud, and Picasso (a striped black and white sock animated by Kahn). It is also here that we are introduced to the painters Francis Bacon (Tony Miyambo) and Lucian Freud (David Viviers), two of the play’s central figures.
There is a great deal of clandestine behaviour that the audience is not made privy to in this first act and the next time we see the two painters, their lives have improved immeasurably. Bacon has landed consignment deals with the MoMa, fallen into untold fortune and is selling more paintings than he can produce. Freud has similar good fortune, though to a lesser extent than his contemporary. Both artists have their muses – Freud’s wife Lady Caroline Blackwood (also played by Kahn), and Bacon’s bumbling thief-turned-lover George Dyer (played by Wilhelm van der Welt).
Through the secret events at the gentlemen’s club and the presence of the respective muses, Kahn puts forward a theory behind the long history of male-dominated arts and culture in the West, and the powerful and successful figures it produces. In this way, The Borrow Pit is something of an allegory for the monstrous and often banal presence of men in the arts, the academy, the world. It is also a play that details the key moments and influences of each painter – Freud’s near-death experience, Bacon’s abusive father – and this is a way of getting us closer to these characters, to follow their stories with genuine interest.
The Borrow Pit is a play that employs a great deal of humour and tragedy in equal measure. It is a work that uses fiction to better make sense of reality – following the lives of painters and philosophers and theorists, based in fact and reason, but extrapolating on the relationships, the power dynamics, the recurring themes of extraction and greed, and generating a play that articulates the absurd and pervasive abuse of power (and subsequently, people) in the world.
– David Mann
CREDITS:
PERFORMERS | Tony Miyambo, David Viviers, Wilhelm van der Welt & Jemma Kahn
WRITERS | Jemma Kahn & Marco Dutra
DRAMATURGE & PHOTOGRAPHER | Jaco B van Schalkwyk
DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER | Jemma Kahn
ILLUSTRATOR | Rebecca Haysom
BOX DESIGNER | Wessel Snyman
STAGE MANAGER | Dimakatso Motholo