Sea change: A scene from the musical theatre production Requiem for the Impossible.
Recently premiered during a limited run in Cape Town, Requiem for the Impossible is an ambitious piece of musical theatre about the death a decade ago of three South African working sailors at sea.
To call the hour-long piece “musical theatre” somehow diminishes the scope of this peculiar and moving work of mourning.
Led by the performances of Lucy Kruger and Liú Mottes, Requiem for the Impossible incorporates poetry, fragments of film as well as audience phones which vibrate and flash. But, most memorable for me was the voice of one of the missing, presumably drowned sailors.
“The peace, the tranquillity, the beauty is all contained in everything of your soul,” skipper Anthony Murray, 58, offers in one of several spoken fragments replayed at key intervals. “It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it, how lucky in life I’ve been.”
The original addressee of these recordings was Murray’s sister-in-law, music journalist Diane Coetzer, also the chief instigator behind this project. Murray and Coetzer, who now lives in Amsterdam, were working on a book about the former’s seafaring adventures when he perished under mysterious circumstances.
It was Coetzer and her husband, former Sony music executive Jeremy “Jay” Savage, who hounded Murray’s employer when he — along with first mate Reginald Robertson, 59, and deckhand Jaryd Payne, 20, — went missing sailing into Cyclone Bansi on a yacht bound for Phuket, Thailand.
Later, they alerted the press to the fact that, unbeknownst to the three sailors, documentation related to their emergency position-indicating radio beacon had been forged. This bit of unofficial company policy fatally delayed their possible rescue.
Only the capsized boat was ever discovered. Requiem for the Impossible ends with footage filmed by divers tasked with identifying the boat by its nameplate, Moorings A5130/Sunsail RC044-978.
Notwithstanding this grim history, litigating the past is not what the core team of expatriate South Africans involved in this theatrical piece is ultimately after. If anything, the play is about wonder and catharsis.
The ocean resists easy summary, which has not prevented sailors and writers from trying to qualify the experience of endless, unknowable water. A plainspoken salty dog, Murray gives it his best shot in his voice recordings. In one fragment he celebrates the sea’s abundance. In another, he acknowledges its overwhelming power.
“It’s not that I’m scared of the sea,” Murray states, “but I respect the sea because the sea is so big and powerful. No favourites out there, it’s you, the survival skills, your knowledge, and to respect your honour and your love for it. Because if you don’t have the love for it then you will be fucked.”
Murray is unavoidably a key protagonist in this production but he is not a domineering presence. Ditto, Grahamstown-born, Berlin-based Kruger, who as the leader of rock outfit Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys, frequently makes her guitar howl. Here, playing wonderfully off the assured company of Mottes, she favours a delicate touch. The pair rehearsed in a darkened, candle-lit room in Uitdam, outside Amsterdam.
The production, which includes Savage’s bluesy poetry, is ably directed by Dr Natalie Dixon and Klasien van de Zandschulp.
A former youth magazine editor in South Africa, Dixon decamped for Amsterdam more than a decade ago, earned a doctorate, and now heads up Affect Lab with van de Zandschulp. This creative studio and research practice deploys a range of digital technologies, in the real and online, to foster digital storytelling around diverse subjects.
Requiem for the Impossible showcases the studio’s omni-media approach to participatory storytelling, although I was left wondering if the phones really contributed much to the production. It’s a minor gripe about an otherwise arresting piece of convergent theatre that speaks to many moods and senses.
Negotiations are underway to stage further shows in Amsterdam and London.