Robindale actor, Charlie Bouguenon enjoys the immediacy of the audience’s response during live shows at the theatre.
“I have always loved acting; To embody characters and tell stories. To give life to words on a page. I love acting for the journey of discovery in unearthing all that a script has to offer,” he told Randburg Sun.
“The smell of the grease paint, the roar of the crowd, as the adage goes. There is nothing quite like a live performance. There’s an exchange of energy in the theatre. You can feel it. The audience is such a part of the performance that they are almost a silent [and sometimes not so silent] player in the show.”
Bouguenon currently plays Vince in Saturday Night at the Palace, at Joburg Theatre which opened on July 28 and runs until August 28. The show graces the stage 41 years after its explosive debut during apartheid in 1982.
It is the impact of this institutionalised racism that the show delves into, with Vince being one of the lead characters shedding light on it.
In Saturday Night at the Palace, Vince is one of two working-class white men who arrive at an isolated roadhouse at closing time. September, the black waiter who works there, is about to go on leave to visit his family which he has not seen in more than two years as they live in an apartheid-enforced homeland.
Comic banter eases the audience into the setting before Vince is told by his friend that his soccer team has dropped him and he has been evicted from his commune.
A volatile situation unfolds at The Palace, where the combination of deep insecurity and entrenched racism sees September bear the tragic brunt of Vince’s unravelling life.
“I have a proclivity for text analysis and enjoy finding the given circumstances in a piece, then delve into character arc, hamartia, objectives, motivations, victories, defeats, shortcomings… and pain of a person going through a specific set of circumstances and how they deal or fail to deal with the challenges they face. I derive immense satisfaction in observing the psychological dominoes fall.”
Bouguenon calls the stage a mirror to society and believes a good theatre leaves the audience with more questions than answers.
“Saturday Night at the Palace is one of Paul Slabolepszy’s seminal works. I read it for the first time when I was in high school and was simply blown away. The innocence with which the play begins and the subsequent dominoes that clatter to its heart-rending conclusion astounded me. This was one helluva powerful piece of theatre. Vince was a character that I’ve wanted to play for nearly 25 years.”
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