David Muller brings out a Karoo full moon

Wednesday, 5 November. On a crunching gravel road somewhere in the Karoo the Toyota hybrid we are in cruises unhurriedly along. Well on time, we resist showing up too early preoccupied as we are as to the sort of cat David Muller might turn out to be. In the papers he is dubbed the ‘Merry Scholar’ – further compounding our curiosity. A cheerful academic? Uhm, none of us have ever met such a man.

Might he be like the ever-grinning law scholar Pierre de Vos or more in the style of the white-haired nutjob Doc Brown from the Back to the Future movies? Mr Alto*, Janco and this writer are left only to conjecture and some last-minute Linkedin espionage. But, pulling into the historic Waenhuis at Hanglip farm – still well-kept, the lawn resembling an English clubhouse after all these years – we’ll soon find out.

The restless one-man storyteller is in town – rather on the farm – and we’re here to experience the performance which the reviewers have written so favourably about whilst quietly wondering if a scholar can really manage to keep a motley audience entertained long enough not to get lost in translation. One imagines he’s gigged in lahnee theaters with lush carpets and velvety curtains. Probably rubbed shoulders with high society and is on a first-name basis with some of the country’s esteemed thespians. Now here he is on a lawn, his audience seated expectantly beneath the verandah of an old Karoo farm house. His audience, in case you’re wondering?

Well, imagine lumping together a gaggle of octogenarians, sprightly farm-school teachers, learners, a taxiload from the nearby town, some farmers and a businessman with a silver tongue. Such is the gathering that Muller must appeal to, every last one of them following and understanding or else what was the point of it all. Oh yes, then one of our hosts Marnus Terblanche tiptoeing about ensuring the throats are hydrated.

Then, suddenly the cordial chatter is pierced by a commanding voice. Something from the 1970’s; a sort of hippie with white hair yelling loudly before he’s even taken his position. Like some madman absentmindedly talking to himself in public. ‘A man must be circumcised’ he shouts. Silence. All eyes are turned to him.

The bill said he’d be performing Blood and Silver: A True Story of Survival and a Son’s Search for His Family Treasure based on a memoir by Jan Glazewski. But the intimate style, peppered with bouts of shrieking exhilaration when things are going good for our protagonist and drawn-out silences when he’s encountered yet another hurdle in his life and you are soon not sure whether the narrator is not in fact telling his own story.

Muller takes us from despair, to enthusiasm, to uncertainty and personal accomplishments that remain altogether meaningless to the South African-born scion of Polish immigrants. That’s because he is yet to honour his father’s dying wish of finding a long-lost family treasure buried some 80 years ago in Poland.

The story itself is well-documented in Glazewski’s memoir but the deeper leitmotifs of survival, resilience and family are so beautifully brought to life in Muller’s sighs and shrugs and intentional stutters when our subject finds himself unsure about his next move.

As an old drama enthusiast, Muller is deeply invested in the arts. To him art is the very pulse of a town, of a community and a society. When the arts flourish, the town is alive. Also, don’t forget his determinist philosophical streaks either, which make no room for genuine coincidence, rather are the sum total of a man’s every action, faith and dreams put into action.

By the time the final line was said, after all the aahs and mmmhs, the man still firmly had the audience’s attention. Before we’d left, I owed him an apology.

‘Sorry for constantly moving my phone around. Had to show my buddies on TikTok glimpses of the play,’ I said.

‘Really? That’s what you were doing?’

‘Yes, let me go online right now so they might finally see that I too hang out with cool people.’

‘Hahaha,’ roared the actor.

And so as a baleful full moon arose on the cusp of a saddle-shaped koppie forming the distant horizon, the former trombonist of the African Jazz Pioneers sat telling wonderful stories about Bra Ntemi Piliso and the guys. About how he first hooked up with the old-school guys before the youngsters came and it no longer quite felt the same again. The photographer’s shutter clicked. The crickets chirped. Get-to-know-each-other-better introductions hummed, and the small-time writer and the one-man maestro sat waving at faces with made-up names on a phone screen. The show was over but for Muller it was just another wonderful day at the office and for his audience a memory worth treasuring.

Featured image: David Muller with some of the members of his audience. Source: Janco Piek. 0