LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD AND THE BIG BAD METAPHORS BY MIKE VAN GRAAN
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Reg. No.: 2011/011959/07
LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD AND THE
BIG BAD METAPHORS
Learning objectives
After you have completed this unit, you should be able to:
● Analyse the text of Little Red Riding Hood and The Big Bad Metaphors according to the dramatic principles.
● Explore the background of the playwright.
● Understand how socio-political circumstances influenced the text.
● Consider the principles of drama, style, genre, staging and setting in the text.
Introduction
This text guide contains all the information you will need to successfully analyse this text and prepare you to answer questions about it.
Important terminology
Term Definition
Commissioned
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Cultural activist
Gobo
Idiophone
Produced specially to order.
A person engaging in a set of creative practices and activities (art, literature, music, cinema, etc.) to promote social change. Blending artistic activities/expressions and activism rooted in the desire to advocate social justice to provoke change in society.
A partial screen used in front of a light or spotlight to project a shape.
Any of a class of instruments whose sound is generated by striking, rubbing, plucking or blowing the material of the instrument itself not under any special tension for example: bell, gong, rattle, wood block, etc.
Term
ISIS
Metaphorical interpretation
Nepotism
Pastiche
Post-apocalyptic
RDP houses
Satire
SGDs
Ubuntu
Definition
The Islamic State of Iraq – a transnational militant Islamist terrorist group and former unrecognised quasi-state that follows the Salafi jihadist branch of Sunni Islam.
Something used symbolically to represent something else, suggesting a comparison. Something is metaphorical when you use it to stand for or symbolise another thing.
A practice among those with power or influence of favouring relatives, friends or associates, especially by giving them jobs.
A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, music or architecture that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists.
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Denoting or relating to the time following a nuclear war or other catastrophic event.
Subsidised housing; a programme that affords a beneficiary to acquire a house that is built and provided by the government through a government subsidy.
The use of humour, irony, exaggeration or ridicule to expose and criticise people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
A universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.
A quality that includes the essential human virtues: compassion and humanity. A Nguni Bantu term meaning ‘humanity’, often translated as ‘I am because we are’.
Read the play Little Red Riding Hood and The Big Bad Metaphors text, together with the notes in this guide and the information about contemporary South African Theatre in ‘Journey 11’ in your VIA Afrika Dramatic Arts Learner’s Book. Read through the text multiple times and study the notes provided here to answer questions about the text.
The playwright – Mike van Graan
Mike van Graan was born in 1959 in Cape Town and matriculated at Harold Cressy High School. In 1980 he completed a BA honours degree specialising in English and Drama from the University of Cape Town. He also has a higher education qualification. From 1982 to 1986 he worked in the field of theology where he travelled to various countries to learn more about liberation theology in popular culture. In 1986, during the state of emergency implemented by the apartheid government, he headed back to Cape Town from Johannesburg.
He attracted the attention of the security police because he organised the Towards a People’s Culture Arts Festival which was banned and labelled as a threat to national security. In 1987 he worked at the South newspaper as a satirical columnist while he completed his postgraduate studies. During this time, he was involved with various committees that promoted arts and culture.
In 1991, his first play, The dogs must be crazy, was released. A string of successful plays followed, including the award-winning Green man flashing. To date, he has written 36 plays, with He had it coming and Little Red Riding Hood and the big bad metaphors being some of the last written in 2019.
Van Graan received an honorary doctorate (PhD honoris causa) in April 2018 from the University of Pretoria. Van Graan is popularly known as a prolific playwright, director and cultural activist. He is celebrated for his contribution to ending apartheid and using his plays to spark conversation about pertinent issues in post-apartheid life in South Africa.
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Overview
Mike van Graan’s play is a fairytale for the future and provides a comedic and satirical take on the subject matter – Sustainable Development Goals. Van Graan was commissioned to write a play that can educate audiences on the Sustainable Development Goals that world leaders agreed to achieve by 2030. Imagine the end of poverty, the reversal of climate change and eradications of violence against women, to name a few. Is this a utopia? Perhaps. But hope is made of dreams. Little Red Riding Hood and The Big Bad Metaphors (sometimes referred to as LRRH or Red Riding Hood in this guide) stages the present world through a metaphorical interpretation.
Mike van Graan
This world is ridden with misogyny, poverty, hunger, lack of climate action, irresponsible dissipation and injustice. This is the reality, globally, which goes against the United Nations’ mission. This post-modern presentation comments on the lack of political commitment to the SGDs. It stays relevant to the past, present and future (especially) as it deals with issues that are pertinent in a contemporary sense – issues that the world faces.
The play was written pre-Covid, and during the pandemic ‘issues’ like gender-based violence and climate change took a backseat, with poverty and hunger foregrounded. Post-pandemic, it seems all social issues have gotten worse along with apathy and despair, making this play all more relevant as we head into the mid-2020s.
THEATRE REVIEW:
Rondebosch Boys High’s stinging immersive experience of Mike van Graan’s Red Riding Hood and The Big Bad Metaphors
Posted by Robyn Cohen | Oct 30, 2021 | ARTS, Performance, Stage
What: Red Riding Hood and The Big Bad Metaphors by Mike van Graan
Where: Rondebosch Boys High School, Cape Town
When: October 30 and 31, 2021
Cast: Rondebosch Boys High School students
Directors: Lauren Snyders and Shaun Gabriël Smith
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There are times when one attends theatre and one is blown away – surprised, engaged, shocked and engrossed on all levels. I was privileged to attend a performance of Mike van Graan’s play RedRidingHoodandTheBigBadMetaphors, staged by Rondebosch Boys High School in Cape Town. This play is signature Mike van Graan – acerbic, satirical, unflinching and darkly humorous – ultimately poignant and moving. Red Riding Hood and The Big Bad Metaphors is a stinging trip as it rips through GBV [gender-based violence], poverty, hunger, climate change, carbon emissions, corruption, elections and poses that ultimately it is down to us to do something – personally, politically, individually and collectively.
The staging by Rondebosch Boys High School is remarkable – an immersive theatre experience, with the audience following the young actors on a journey through classrooms in the school. It is not what I would have expected as a school play. This production, co-directed by Lauren Snyders and
Shaun Gabriël Smith could and should be presented at festivals such as Infecting the City – as a site responsive piece. Watching this play, staged in Cape Town, on the weekend before the local elections, it reverberates chillingly in terms of the apathy I see around me, with so many people telling me that they are not bothering to vote. Is it apathy or despair? To add to that, tomorrow – November 31– is the start of COP26 – the 2021 – the United Nations climate change conference –taking place in Glasgow, Scotland until November 12. I googled and I don’t see any high-ranking delegates from South Africa, in attendance at COP [Conference of the Parties]. Well, we have an election coming up, so presumably, COP wasn’t on the agenda.
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When Mike van Graan wrote Red Riding Hood and The Big Bad Metaphors, Covid was not in the frame. During the pandemic, ‘issues’ like GBV and climate change have been side-lined to an extent, with poverty and hunger foregrounded. Of course everything is intertwined in Rona, things have got a lot worse and so has apathy and despair. Van Graan was commissioned by the University of Pretoria to produce a play on the theme of the Sustainable Development Goals, during his residency at the university in 2019. The result was Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Metaphors. The play premiered at The National Arts Festival in 2019 and won a Standard Bank Ovation Award. It was staged that same year at The Hilton Arts Festival – to wide acclaim. Then Covid arrived. This year – 2021- The IEB [Independent Examinations Board] prescribed the play for study at IEB schools. This week, when I received an invitation by Shaun Gabriël Smith to attend one of the performances, I thought, “okay a school production with a play by Mike van Graan that I have not seen, cool.” In a series of voice notes on WhatsApps, Smith told me about the approach and staging in classroom at the school and I realised that this was not going to simply be a school play in a theatre.
It was an inspired choice by the directors to stage the play in classrooms in the school. The play is a howl and appeal for us to take heed of the mess we are in.In this production, we are at school, with the young actors and we are being instructed in the perils of a fairy tale which has gone rancid. Is the big bad wolf the villain or is he what he is because he has lost his natural habitat –with carbon emissions and whatnot eroding his forest? The politician wolf quips that if we want safe affordable homes with running water and electricity,
we should vote for him. Little Red riding Hood is a Greta Thunberg type activist, urging us to listen up and not go into a blah blah rant of doing nothing. Red Riding Hood as Mother Earth has no rights in court. She has been violated and plundered and has not been able to arrive ‘safe’ at her grandmother’s house. The three little piggies build their homes as best as they can, in the slums in the city; in a city ‘that doesn’t sleep to avoid history that does not reap’. Hopefully there won’t be home invasion by the wolf, but violence is everywhere and no one is safe. We are left with musings by the Bard and – what happens next, is up to us – sings the chorus of young actors. A brilliant production of a brilliant play
About the play
Style: Episodic, no set structure
Structure: Fragmented, episodic, fractured
Technique: Satirical, Postmodern
Setting: The play is a fable, with many different locations to explore its variety of themes.
Time: The play is set in the present, but its nature as a fable means it can go backward and forward in time.
Make sure you read the playwright’s note in your play text page 12–14 for more indepth background information on why Mike van Graan wrote this play and the SDGs (sustainable developmental goals) he covers in the story.
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Plot summary
Opening scene
The play starts with six actors who form a Greek-type chorus, moving to a rhythm and interpreting words in unison. They set the scene for us of how there once was a forest (before deforestation, etc.). The audience is then introduced to Mom Hood and Red Hood. Red is listening to rap music through earphones and Mom Hood interrupts, asking her to take some goodies to Gran. Red doesn’t want to, saying she wants to rather play with the bear cubs (she missed them as she had been away at boarding school). Our first realisation that things aren’t the same in the forest anymore, is when Mom Hood replies that there are no more bear cubs, they have been hunted for their fur. Their conversation takes a turn to Gran, who still cooks by making a fire with wood (like billions of others on the planet). Mom mentions that they have electricity to cook, but they have loadshedding, so Gran is cooking for them again and adds that at least they won’t go hungry like millions of other people. When Red complains about the tomato bredie that Gran will be preparing for them, we realise that Red is not keen on going to Gran because of something that happened before she went to boarding school. The scene morphs into Red-, Mom-, Dad- and Gran Hood all sitting around the dinner table discussing Red’s education and future. Mom wants to send her to a better school, but Dad and Gran oppose this because it would cost a lot of money and girls don’t need to be educated (two issues that form part of the SGDs – gender equality and quality education). Red was disappointed in her Gran for her outdated perspective on women getting a decent education.
The scene morphs back to Red standing centre stage with other chorus members around her. The chorus provides facts about deforestation.
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Red Riding Hood and other actors in a scene from the play.
Mom comes back and the initial scene continues with her putting Red’s report card in the basket for Gran to read. Mom is proud of how well Red is doing, outperforming all the boys in her class. The chorus starts singing ‘I’m a freedom fighter’ with Red, while providing facts about the global education issues, including how illiteracy is highest among females.
