Janice Honeyman was lucky that the people who pitched Bangalory Time to the SABC in the early days of South African television attended the opening night of Story Theatre at the Alexander Theatre in Joburg in the 1970s.
They loved what they saw in the red-haired woman on stage and asked her to audition for one of the country’s first children’s TV shows.
The luck is because Honeyman only performed the production that one night, having hurt her leg at the start of the evening. “I did the whole show on torn ligaments. Your endorphins and the adrenalin just go, so I got through the show and didn’t play it again. I couldn’t walk for the next six or seven weeks,” she remembers.
Honeyman had broken her leg earlier that year while ice skating which is why it was in a weakened state, but that earlier break was how she got into theatre directing in the first place. And her big TV break, it turned out.
She and creators Esme Solnick and Angela Sills (who wrote 80 percent of Bangalory Time’s stories) had long discussions about how best to present the stories “and it was very interesting because it was the very beginning of television”.
“This TV show was 40 years ago,” she says as we sit down for an interview at the Baxter Theatre where she is preparing her production, Bangalory’s Back.
“It started on a Tuesday and it was all ceremonies and flags, minister so and so and minister so and so… alles baie wit(all very white)…and then Wednesday, at 6 o’ clock was Kathy Kahn in Everywhere Express, and Janice Honeyman in Bangalory Time.
“From the first moment, people loved it. Esme and Angela had great imagination for children. Esme was a teacher before she was a television director and Angela was also a teacher, so they really knew what kids liked. And that’s how it started.”
“It was storytelling and imagination, and I suppose I’ve always cared about stories. Whether it’s the work I do as a director, the story is always very important. So, I became a good storyteller,” says Honeyman.
The TV show featured a monkey and an armadillo which flew in a spaceship, and as it went along more characters were introduced, like the cat. “I told stories and we’d break away from me to graphics and we’re still doing that (for the stage production),” says Honeyman,
“We’re using, I hope, projections through a window. So we’ve got the Bangalory Short Story Shop. I’m calling it the the Bangalory Short Story Shop and you can get any story in there, which is slightly different to the format we had then. It’s like a story spaza shop.”
“Like an internet portal?” I ask, to which comes a drawn out: “Jaaaa…”
This time around, she’s not using old Bangalory Time stories, but drawing on a new supply.
“I couldn’t do Latin for toffee, but I loved Ovid’s Metamorphoses. So when we translated that I used to take a lot of care. There was a story of a dolphin,” she reminisces. Honeyman has also been swimming with dolphins in Mozambique, which she describes as a “magical, almost religious experience”, so she drew on those two memories to create Arlindo and the Dolphins, one of the stories for the stage production, about dealing with bullying.
Another story, The Butterfly Miracle, references a trip she would regularly make between Pretoria and Joburg which, at a particular time of the year, meant suddenly driving through a swarm of hundreds of butterflies: “The sun shines net so and the sky is full of butterflies.”
The other three stories she, Marty Kintu and Zoleka Helesi will draw on are probably The Tale of Twankerly Gloop, a modern day retelling of Hansel and Gretel turned into “Simphiwe and Nikiwe” and a version of kamishibai – the old Japanese style of storytelling – in “Thoko and Tholeka’s Takeaways”.
The stage production is “a combination of narration and enaction, which is different to Bangalory Time. It is, I hope, going to be as interactive as we can be, while still getting the stories out”.
The stories are quite structured, broken up into her mainly doing the narrating while Marty and Zoleka play characters, with “maybe a bit of Xhosa thrown in”.
“It integrates a children’s play and a storytelling session.”
She knows the 10-year olds who sat down to watch her on TV back in 1976 are different to today’s iPhone-touting generation. “First of all, because of kids’ attentions spans, I’m cutting down the stories as much as I can. I find that anyway with the pantomimes I work on, everything has to be shorter, sharper, more focused, more direct.
“We have to make it visual, so we’re using puppets, illustrations, projections, props and a whole lot of stuff. What’s going to be interesting for me because I’m in it, is that I have to wear my director’s hat firmly on my head so I can judge myself as an actress, and them as actors when I’m involved with them on stage, so it’s quite an effort.”
Honeyman has only ever directed herself as an actor twice, so stepping back onto the stage like this means going back to the beginning again.
“Warm-ups for a start,” she laughs. “Vocal warm-ups and I’ve got to do exercises. I’ve got to walk half an hour a day to get myself just breathing fully and properly again. So, ja, I’ve got a lot of work to do. Doing children’s theatre is extremely energetic.”
While this show is ideally suited to children aged 5 to 12, Honeyman knows many of them will be dragged to the Baxter by parents who remember the TV show, and she has this idea she wants to explore which would cater directly to that audience – an adult sherry and stories session while the kids are next door in the world of Bangalory.
l Bangalory’s Back is at the Baxter from Wednesday to January 9, at 10am and noon daily from Wednesday to Saturday.