By BRUCE DENNILL
To Life, With Love / Directed by Josh Lindberg / The Baxter Studio, Baxter Theatre, Cape Town
John Maytham’s voice plays a huge role in the way the broadcaster earns his loving as a Cape Talk radio host, and it almost becomes a standalone character in this thought-provoking, elegiac musing on entering a stage of life when plans, perspectives and relationships are at the mercy of a suddenly more fragile body and the concomitant caution that must accompany it.
Maytham’s character, Thomas Michael Faulkner is a well-to-do everyman who has come to terms with the concepts of retirement and what will inevitably follow and is looking forward to what is shaping up to be a rich and intriguing phase of life – until it isn’t.
Mike Van Graan’s script – commissioned by Maytham, though the latter didn’t specify a theme – delves garrulously into meditations on mortality. It’s a theme that any audience can relate to: those younger than Maytham will get there at some point and will already have parents or grandparents going through the scenarios he describes; those at a similar stage of life will probably experience the narrative as a gentle but discomfiting gut-punch; and those older than the actor and character will be able to process the script with added nuance from their own experiences.
Director Josh Lindberg ensures that Maytham’s hour-long monologue is not simply a stand-and-deliver speech, bringing in three chairs and a lighting design that gives the actor added opportunity to give Faulkner emotional depth, physical urgency, or body language that heightens the intensity of whatever moment of joy, reflection or anguish the character is going through.
Maytham hits all of those marks smoothly and with contained confidence, being at once a recognisable public figure and disappearing into another individual who is completely separate, even if he may be an archetype instantly recognisable to the actor. But to return to that voice… Maytham’s control and manipulation of his instrument is phenomenal. Tone and inflection changes communicate and enhance everything from amusement to shock, from resignation to pain, and from conviction to tenderness.
There are no frills in this production, and yet through the combination of sensitive but luxuriant loquaciousness and a masterclass in monologue delivery, the piece transports its audience to a place of aching, rewarding significance, brilliant as both a standalone piece and as a reminder of the worth of intimate one-person shows in general.