Open Your Mind: Theatre Space, Performance, and Audience

 

Courtyard Theatre Battersea Arts Centre. Photo courtesy of Howarth Tompkins.

 

It’s a hot day in August 2016 and I am cooling off in the Courtyard, Battersea Arts Centre’s new outdoor theatre that is tucked away in a precinct within the centre’s huge building, as artistic director David Jubb passionately describes how the new space has come into being.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been in the space. I was previously here to see the Courtyard’s inaugural show Extravaganza Macabre, a spoof Victorian melodrama by the energetic and raucous theatre company Little Bulb, but today there is an eerie calm and almost ghost-like presence in the empty auditorium. It belies the origins of the space, which perhaps began back in 2007 with a rather embarrassing theatrical mishap for Jubb.

At the time Jubb, in Brazil on a trip researching Latin American theatre, walked into Teatro Oficina in Sao Paulo and had an experience that would influence his ideas about theatre from that day forward. He was late for the theatre’s six-hour Brazilian political play and the only entry to the auditorium was through two big metal doors that featured heavily in the show. With no choice, Jubb’s mortification at such a prominent entrance increased when one of the doors fell off in his hands. With all eyes upon him, including those of the actors, Jubb was thunderstruck. He didn’t speak Portuguese, but clearly, by the urgent physical gestures from an actor dressed as a soldier, he was meant to do something. But what? When Jubb finally worked out he had to put the door back on its hinges in order for the show to go on, the said actor then showed Jubb to his seat via a ladder. Despite the encounter making him “feel like bursting into tears,” it helped form Jubb’s belief that an audience is part of or should be part of every show they see. The experience also helped Jubb consider how the interior design of a theatre can play a prominent role in influencing how an audience, by being subtly invited to physically cross and/or interact with the playing space, can participate in the performance.

Teatro Oficina was designed by Lina Bo Bardi and mirrors the shape of a narrow street after and in memory of the theatre’s creator Zé Celso, who when he was on an acid trip and running from the police, found himself trapped against a solid wall. How the theatre merges into the city block culture on the street, influenced Jubb’s work with theatre architects Howarth Tompkins in remodelling the Courtyard’s space from an old smoking den for staff into a workable performing area. The Courtyard is a small, but tall and narrow affair. Halfway up the auditorium in the “circle,” the audience has the ability to watch the show and the audience in the stalls below at the same time, a concept that Jubb is very much taken with as it increases human interaction and is a spectacle in itself. And up at the very top, in the narrow gallery, the audience can not only see the action and the other audience members, but are also close to the sky and can see some of the rest of London too.

Architectural immersion, i.e., fitting new designs around the found history of the original building to hold on to and even highlight history and a building’s previous uses is also integral to the historically layered and ghost-like feel of the Courtyard.  

Little Bulb, Extravaganza Macabre at Battersea Arts Centre. Photo by Alex Brenner. 

 

Audience and actors also use the very same entrances and exits. This idea is borrowed from Jubb’s experience with that door in Sao Paulo. And by keeping the sense of “wrap” that a courtyard naturally has and refusing to knock down walls and enlarge the playing area, the small space, like Oficina, brings its audiences intentionally knees up against the performers and makes interaction with audiences not just possible, but highly probable. During Extravaganza Macabre actors were in audiences’ laps, they banged into audience members as they rushed around on stage, there could be no pretense of a fourth wall, and when things went wrong, the audience could choose whether to carry on the theatrical illusion with the actors or to disturb it.

Architectural immersion, i.e., fitting new designs around the found history of the original building to hold on to and even highlight history and a building’s previous uses is also integral to the historically layered and ghost-like feel of the Courtyard. For example, red brick laid in 1893 joins up against new white tiles and the effect is reminiscent of the innards of old Victorian shops, though they make Jubb think of “an infinity-edge swimming pool.”

At 123-years old, Battersea Arts Centre was once Battersea’s Town Hall and its history surrounds the Courtyard audience and pays homage to it. The East wall (looking towards the playing area) used to be the Council’s Sanitary offices, another wall supported the kitchens and ladies loos. Beyond that was a long-since-gone lift shaft and huge kitchen.

But Jubb is also concerned about how the public perceives, or is invited to perceive a theatrical space, and these concerns have motivated not just the internal design of the Courtyard, but what surrounds it. “When you go into a theatre it is sometimes very clear where you go, what you do, where you sit, how you behave and it is all managed and regimented and some people like that and that’s fine, but for me there’s something about going into a space where there is a risk: you have to fix a door, you have to negotiate your way around an experience,” says Jubb. His thoughts mirror some of Bo Bardi’s own, for whom the ability to explore is the key to experiencing space: “Architecture is created, ‘invented anew,’ by each man who attempts her, who roams her space, climbs a stair, rests on a balustrade, lifts his head to look, open, close a door, who sits down or gets up and makes intimate contact with —and at the same time create ‘forms’ in—the space.”

Getting to the Courtyard follows this concept. You have to leave BAC’s foyer, feel your way around a corner, walk down a corridor, all the while wondering what is behind this door? where does this passage lead?, pass workshops and set and lighting stores with huge glass doors before you stumble, as if by accident, on the Courtyard. BAC doesn’t over-sign and you feel a sense of ownership that as a member of the public that you can go just about anywhere in the building. But what’s important is that you are allowed to think this, allowed to think, is this public territory? should I be here or not? And experience that thrill.

Many people in many different capacities from all sorts of backgrounds have wandered through BAC, so it is interesting to ask, how can the Courtyard reach out to different audiences, as well as offering audiences new experiences? “Cultural organizations need to think carefully about how they do their work. We have to make sure we don’t just do our work in here,” says Jubb emphatically gesturing at the Courtyard, “but outside.” An implication, perhaps that no matter the design of the new theatre set at the heart of BAC, to get to it there is still the barrier of BAC’s imposing front door, which is still reminiscent of the Edwardian era and British power and might be an entrance that some people will never pass through.

Can we get to a stage where audiences, using the tools at their disposal given to them by the architects and theatres, are able to create their own auditorium spaces and set the physical parameters with the actors for the performance?  

Little Bulb, Extravaganza Macabre at Battersea Arts Centre. Photo by Alex Brenner.

 

How Howarth Tompkins might be involved with getting people through or across this barrier still remains to be seen. But here is an interesting question: If it is possible, in Jubb’s words, for architects to become “theatre programmers as the theatre programmers become architects” (i.e., for artistic directors and architects to plan together spaces like the Courtyard with theatre companies like Littlebulb in mind) can they then also work more with audiences too? Can we get to a stage where audiences, using the tools at their disposal given to them by the architects and theatres, are able to create their own auditorium spaces and set the physical parameters with the actors for the performance that will then take place?

The sun’s up now on the Courtyard. Watching over it all before he goes off for another meeting, Jubb offers ideas of how the Courtyard might be used in other shows. Audiences could “Watch the shows from the inside the building itself” looking out onto the Courtyard’s stage, or the show could take place in the rooms, with the audience gathered in the Courtyard and being “drawn by artists about where to look.” It seems that the possibilities for the new space are infinite.

“In the conventional theatres,” muses Jubb, “the risk is that we are not really listening to how buildings and space impacts on an audience. Theatre should open your mind and you should have a space that does that.” Likely, the Courtyard could be that space. Also, we should listen to buildings and what they tell us. They have a lot to commemorate, a lot to say about the future. Let’s see how the past will merge with the present and future at BAC’s the Courtyard.

first published in Howlround

Deptford

night, Deptford Rails, face

in boyish contemplation, wise guy,

trembling rage, reading

See Me Now review- Young Vic

As the lights go down at the end of See Me Now’s press night the audience rise collectively to their feet in outright admiration. This display of elation is not born out of left liberal values, but out of respect for the performers, for the gutsy real life stories they as an audience have just been witness to and the realisation of the emotional cost that telling such stories has for the ensemble.

See Me Now © Matt Humphreys

The show is about the sex industry and is a Young Vic Taking Part production two years in the making with director Mimi Poskitt at the helm and in collaboration with High Tide and Look Left Look Right and is performed and developed by those that know it best- sex workers. Molly Taylor’s text is inspirationally episodic in nature and gives us elliptical and yet intimate real life portraits of the performers onstage and of those who have dropped out of the project, but still want their voices heard. We hear from men and women, transgender and intersex people all playing themselves. Yes, we all know that such shows that work with non professionals could risk being branded as “therapeutic” ( as if such a show should be contained somehow for its creativity and limited by its label? though I wonder what is wrong with therapeutic anyway? Therapy is a two way street after all) and also, in this case because of its multiple storytelling nature “lacking in character development” but to see the work merely through such prisms would be to do it an injustice and to misinterpret its genre. Why? First, because any show- and the same can be said of a show with professional actors- must be approached by the audience with the same spirit within which it has been created-  and the spirit here is one of openness and informality. And second, its chosen genre must be embraced, even if, as happens here, it is a departure from it.

Audiences might come to the show because they are intrigued and curious about an industry that for so long this country has ideologically been in denial about and has pushed to the edge of society in order to make it invisible, impeding our growth towards a more just community and encouraging human rights abuses. Many might not normally have cause (or think so anyway) to venture into it, although if sex workers could be recognised as therapists (why not?) then we might all be the better for it. In terms of mystique, technical knowledge and humour it does not disappointment. Want to know how to fit a Holy Chastity Trainer device? Governess Elizabeth, who holds a PhD on the practice of chastity in male submissives, will give a full explanation. Curious about the psychological reasons behind why women and some men, hire escorts? Male gigolo Flynt will reveal all. There are also plenty of emotionally raw moments- particularly pertinent is B’s story about being transgender-  tonight the stakes are raised when she reveals her dad is in the audience. We share all the performers’ emotions as they talk to us and the imaginative leap that we are required to take as they do so bounds us to them all the more. We hear a lot about the penis- a lot- and a bit less about the vagina and vulva and I kept wondering, what about the vagina?  Are we still, collectively, squeamish about talking about vaginas?

There are also some political messages too and aside from the most obvious, one that puts our institutions to shame. It’s an illustration of just how willingly people will indulge themselves in behaviours that they also claim to be illegal or at best, immoral, if they are the law and have power. Notions of romantic victimisation and inclusive exclusion also become moral equivalents. We see and hear about how abuses of power occur by those meant to protect us.

Structurally the show may feel a little uneven, there is less about sex trafficking than there might be, but that’s a small price to pay for the overall honest and emotionally raw experience. The message that sex workers are people with their own problems too and are educated, wise and fearless may feel trite to some, but this country unfairly stigmatises them, sometimes seeing them as less than human and so leaving them unprotected (sex workers in Amsterdam have their own union for instance, no such luck here, though there are collectives). This must change and seeing this show and acknowledging the people in it could be the beginning of persuading hearts and minds. It’s hot, raw, outrageous fun and full of love and perhaps is paving the way for future shows like this to enter a broader, theatrical arena, as they should.

The show is on at the Young Vic until 4th March but is sold out. It is worth trying for returns though.

Harare

Which

like ashified time

and fallen off years

I dream of.

Sadness war cries

my horizon and

dagger stabs my skin.

Beneath a whirring fan

which blows your tears

my hands shape comfort,

holding air.

You are a ghost of

a memory I never had,

leaving no trace on your face

even though now

all is the time there is-

everything runs riot.

for 8

If you kiss me, kiss me: Young Vic

The inspiration behind Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice was the playwright wondering what would happen if a young girl opened her mouth and it wasn’t her voice that came out, but other people’s. Jane Horrocks burst onto the musical scene in that stage play and subsequent film and also later, on the Young Vic stage, in Richard Jone’s sharp critique and homage to and of Hollywood and Broadway in the main role in Annie Get Your Gun. It could be that the same inspiration behind Little Voice and AGYG is similar here: what will happen if a 53-year-old Lancastrian actress, with a smokey yet belting voice, got up onstage and fronted the albums that made North Britain’s punk and rock powerhouse famous in the theatre that, in the 1970s, echoed to the beats of The Who, who were rehearsing their masterpiece Who’s Next?

What happens is a hybrid mix of dance, throbbing music, commentary and tragicomedy as Horrocks and her dance troupe, accompanied by a humorously deadpan band including an amused Kipper on guitar and glass encased Rat Scabies holding out on the drums, croon, and bellow out Gang of Four’s Anthrax through to Morrisey’s Life is a Pigsty.

It’s already been talked about that the albums, including Fiction Romance and My New House, made up the soundtrack of Horrocks’ 70s and 80s youth. Most of the covers, strung along by a thematically conceived narrative in this pulsating and dramatically exciting 60 minutes, are a poetic mix of the pain and ecstasy of a North of England quietly losing its soul during the Thatcher years and reinventing itself- loudly- singing about love and all things kitchen sink. But “Why sing about it?” asks Horrocks in the intro as dancers pirouette and gyrate through cunnilingus inspired moves conceived by Aletta Collins, who also directs.  The answer is in Bunny Christie’s stripped back stage design.  In “Persil white” (the washing powder was the epitome of 80s youth culture) it is a passing nod to kitchen sink realism with the appearance and reappearance of a whiter than white fridge (we are all fridge junkies now but in the 1970s only 58% of people owned an ice house) and a Formica table, badges of a materialistic obsessed culture clashing against  the idea of dirty beer sodden, drugged up clubs and pubs of the North. We want our drug fuelled dirty beerhouses but also our Persil Whites and possessions, but these two different sets of values rub up against each other; one is a railing against the status quo, the other is an acceptance of it.

Accidentally, this show is a perfect compliment to Jim Cartwright’s new play Raz, soon to open at the Trafalgar Square studios. Although contemporary, it is about a similar scene and a critique of the disenfranchised northern working class who are lost. They, as Horrocks donning her listless boiler suit at the beginning and end of the play suggests, also work hard all week and party like weekend millionaires. The music’s similar, but the sentiment is not. There’s no political engagement or kick against the establishment (as portrayed in traditional kitchen sink realism )and, yes, everyone is having constant sex. If You Kiss Me, Kiss Me, harks at a similar kind of loss of pride, even if we can’t quite pinpoint it. But it is there as dancer Michael Walter pirouettes and hip hops on his own stark dance floor surrounded by Tim Reid’s video that harks to a JG Ballard esque dystopia that smacks of Chris Cunningham’s film Come to Daddy by Aphex Twin. Horrocks, in her role as  curator of these sad tales, watches in melancholic spirit.

It’s theatrical too. One of the most poignant, emotionally enthralling moments comes during The Smiths I know It’s Over. Horrocks barely sings but chokingly expostulates “It’s over and over and over”. It’s like Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes (where a female can’t ingest the world’s crises anymore) and Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone (where a female character, stuck for words, can only utter “terrible rage”) meets Horrocks and The Smiths. And it gets you. Horrocks howls like a banshee, the effect of which travels up your spine and ends as tear pricks in the eyes. What’s this cry for? Love lost. Time lost. And not just Horrocks’.

“It’s an archeological exercise,” says Horrocks. But as we know, all archeology is about the future. As the lights dim and Horrocks leaves the stage, there’s a sense of wistfulness and uncertainty. “Life is a pigsty and is always the same”? Perhaps. But whilst there’s music and theatre and may be the beginnings of a new theatrical form…? 

Rockingly good, this is a must-see, even if you don’t know or like, the music.

cast includes: Fabienne Debarre, Conor Doyle, Daniel Hay- Gordon, Jane Horrocks, Kipper, Mark Neary, Lorena Randi, Rat Scabies, Michael Walters

direction & choreography: Aletta Collins

Musical Producer & arrangements: Kipper

Design: Bunny Christie

Light: Andreas Fuchs

Sound: Paul Arditti

Video: Tim Reid

Musical Direction: Kipper

Assistant Director: Joe Hancock

until April 16

first published in Exeunt

To Moscow?- a brief look at the state of Russian theatre

Some Russian critics “love to kill what they can’t control” wrote John Freedman in the Moscow Times in 2015. He continued: “Theatre, of course, is bigger and messier and more lively than all of us put together.” After four consecutive nights watching new Russian plays (little performed in the UK) translated by Noah Birksted-Breen at London’s Frontline Club—plays that are consciouslyabout the social state of Russia and her theatre, one could go away thinking Russia herself wants to kill what she can’t control. The question is whether and how this may happen. Is Russian theatre in peril? Sources comment that it is alive and kicking in the provinces, where most new plays are staged. But they are dystopian works “that define Russia as an unconquerable, forbidden, illogical country where any social experimenting is drowned in the mysticism, viscosity, and waywardness of the Russian soul.” The theatre critic Pavel Rudnev writes that Russia’s theatrical elders are expressing “anti-liberal” notes with stagings of some of Dostoevsky’s best-known works expressing the pointlessness of a revolutionary spirit . And the Putin government’s insistence on converting more and more theatres into state-run institutions and its pressure on private landlords who rent out space to the politically independent and outspoken theatres such as Teatr.doc must ring alarm bells. Softly, maybe, but ring they must.

A post-show discussion featuring Alexandrina Markov, Oliver Bullough, Vladimir Ashurkov, John Freedman, among others. Photo by Sophie Kayes.

On the first night of the play readings, a venture between the journalists’ charity, Plymouth Theatre Royal, and Sputnik Theatre, the choice of work, Doctor (Notes of a Provincial Doctor) was a good illustration of the present federation’s disintegration of social structures. The play explores how many hospitals in the Russian provinces are understocked, understaffed, or are being dismantled, often leaving patients with nowhere to turn. The play has been in rep at Teatr.doc for ten years as a result of its popularity with the medical community, in particular. Elena Iseva, the playwright, uses verbatim techniques to expound, word for word, the experiences of a doctor as he journeys from medical student to surgeon in rural Russia. Played with a hint of wistful yet slightly boorish sentimentalism by Alex Cox, drawing surely on Chekhov’s Mikhail Lvovich Astrov in Uncle Vanya or Tcheboutykin in The Three Sisters, Doctor (Notes of a Provincial Doctor) lays bare the sick, badly financed, and sometimes hilarious state of the Russian health system.

Reading of Zhanna. Photo by Sophie Kayes.

The reading of Zhanna the night after, by twenty-seven-year-old playwright Yaroslava Pulinovich, may, at first, seem to bear no connection. It’s a stark look at a self-made new Russian woman who outmaneuvers the mafia gangs in the lawless “pop, glamour, and gangster” period of the 1990s (the first chaotic decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union) to manage a small chain of boutiques, making herself wealthy in the process. We join Zhanna just as her toy-boy is about to leave her for his younger and pregnant “real love.” What follows is a hard-hitting account of Zhanna’s quest for revenge. While Zhanna has been commonly referred to by the critics as a “straightforward melodrama,” it charts an important psychological shift in Russia’s national character during Perestroika and the move from economic restraint to excess living in a “grab what you can” cultural moment.

It goes on to caution against arts and culture that diverge from Russia’s traditional values, stating, “No experiments with form can justify the substance that contradicts the values traditional for our society.” What must this do to a people?  

If the first two plays deal with Russia’s immediate history, Grandchildren by Alexandra Polivanova and Mikhail Kaluzhsky, is an attempt to rationalize Stalinism. Dealing with territory written about so hauntingly and truthfully by Vassily Grossman in Life and Fate, the play offers testimonies from the grandchildren of those whose family members were Stalinists, in the NKVD, or members of the Communist Party. It deals with guilt, self-censorship, and with the need to excuse and the desire to forgive. It is original, for when do we hear about or from the relatives of mass murderers, executioners, or any kind of criminal offenders? Who tells their stories? They are often the ones forgotten in the mass outcry pitying victims and venting rage against the victors, and they are left to process the legacy of inherited guilt on their own, when in fact, one could argue, it should be a communal experience. But if this play is trying, in some small part, to do what the Nuremberg Trials did for Germany—to bring a country to face and therefore to reconcile with its past—the post-reading discussion, given by speakers Alexandrina Markov, Oliver Bullough, Vladimir Ashurkov, and John Freedman warned that Russia may be creeping back into the Soviet Era, not out of it. The fact that a new Stalin educational center has opened in Penza, Meyerhold’s birthplace, is not lost on Russia’s artistic community, yet it highlights a deep psychological conflict raised in the play. Russia has not processed Stalin and WWII, yet through censorship and political pressure (Putin’s version of Stalin is to be taught in schools for example) her government continues to inflict wounds on open sores before they have had a chance to be understood or heal, a typical old-style KGB tactic. Is Russia heading back into the dark murky days of the USSR?

In December 2014, Vladimir Putin signed a new cultural policy document detailing Russia’s “rejection” of the “principles of tolerance and multiculturalism.” It goes on to caution against arts and culture that diverge from Russia’s traditional values, stating,  “No experiments with form can justify the substance that contradicts the values traditional for our society.” What must this do to a people?

Reading of The War Has Not Started Yet. Photo by Sophie Kayes.

The closing play, Mikhail Durnenkov’s The War Has Not Started Yet, commissioned by A Play A Pint & A Pie and the National Theatre of Scotland, perhaps has a preemptive imaginative answer—of sorts. Reminiscent of the style in Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, and premiering just as Russian troops occupied Ukraine, it is not about a war on a frontline, unless you see that line as a domestic one. Instead, using a large number of vignettes, it explores a variety of Russian characters suffering neurosis, psychosis, and schizophrenia as a result of what is happening to them in their own country. Characters are unable to function in a world that is increasingly lived through the pursuit of sensual fulfillment or, in equal amounts, internal and external oppression. They suffer mental and emotional overload and their natural human tendencies are suppressed, either by themselves or others. In the play, the characters fail to distinguish between what is real or not real (referring to Russian State TV’s tendency to fake news reports, or bend the truth of news stories to fit their agenda), they cross boundaries, abuse others, and look at the world through a filter of mysticism. One scene recounts a moment where a father feels that there is a connection between the simultaneous events of his son going missing and his ability to refrain from smoking at such a time of great stress. We don’t hear if the son is found and we presume that he is not. We realize that so many Russians are in jail, searching for meanings of their own, as the state’s official roads to truth dead end. Russia’s citizens look at their own lives and their country’s history, through the bars of state-led oppression.

What does the future look like for Russian theatre? It is unknown territory, though some fear one path may already have been laid out years ago in the Stalinist period. Teatr doc. itself is allowed to exist for the moment. But the authorities could shut Teatr. doc down if they wanted. Why don’t they? Perhaps it is something to do with why Putin invades other countries: he keeps himself in power by creating problems only he can solve. Perhaps the announcement that the Minister of Culture would vet new plays and since redacted because of a public outcry, was also a psychological trick. For now, though, Teatr.doc’s artistic director refuses to listen to what she calls the “whispers in her ear” or believe any “conspiracy theories” about the State’s real feelings about theatre, and the one she runs especially.

What does the future look like for Russian theatre? It is unknown territory, though some fear one path may already have been laid out years ago in the Stalinist period.  

Putting in half measures against Russia’s artistic dissent by kicking Teatr.doc from building to building, yet allowing their plays to take place, or by threatening the censorship of new work but not following through with it, seems a fine line for the Russian government to tread and it forces the theatre world to be constantly on guard. Theatregoing in Russia is a serious business, though they reject it as a “time killing” enterprise. The 115 theatres in Moscow pride themselves on being almost completely sold out all of the time. Where else in the world does theatre matter as much as this? Putin is, for now, cutting just enough slack for theatre to survive as a much-muted place of dissent, but will it be enough for its people? Might they demand more? Theatre is “messier” and “bigger” than us, so it seems only time will tell.

This article was originally published by Howlround

– See more at: http://howlround.com/to-moscow#sthash.a87bQnpf.dpuf

Belarus, the disabled, the KGB and Belarus Free Theatre’s Fortinbras

Belarus Free Theatre’s theatrical laboratory Fortinbras’ provocations of pop up contemporary art and theatre shone a bright light through the chinks of the armor of Belarus’ dictatorship this past December in a cold and rainy Minsk.

Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) pioneer performance inspired campaigning, now, only months after Belarus signed the UN convention to protect the human rights of those with disabilities, Fortinbras’ students yielded the fruits of their own training to mount a series of “public actions, installations and performances across Minsk asking: ‘Why don’t we see people with disabilities around us?’”

Belarus is in the grip of uncertainty, it stunts itself when it embraces difference with only half hearted measures, it is plagued with anxiety when these measures are tested and are found wanting, it wishes to go forward but is caught in the throes of a dictatorship which forces the country to tread water.  

Belarus Free Theatre and Fortinbras stand with the banned and the disabled are banned in Belarus. The theatre’s modes of theatrical practices have grown, by necessity, out of the stranglehold of Alexander Lukashenko’s continuing dictatorship. The time seems right to up the ante, Lukashenko was recently returned to power in what many believe to be rigged elections in October 2015. In a city run by the KGB, the only secret service agency opting to keep its name after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, how can such performance interventions affect the citizens of this oppressed municipal? The answer is to bring the disabled and impaired out onto the streets of Minsk and invite its citizens to look at, see, acknowledge, and accommodate difference. In a country which seems to function as a satellite state, where even the mention of Lukashenko’s name in derogative terms seems sacrilege, the time is ripe for such a move as NGOs and The Office for The Rights of Persons with Disabilities watch, over the next two years, to see how the government will fulfill its obligations set out in the UN convention. It’s a country where 50 percent of its people have said they are ready to integrate those with disabilities, but where 80 percent of those who are disabled are unemployed. You might say, Belarus is in the grip of uncertainty, it stunts itself when it embraces difference with only half hearted measures, it is plagued with anxiety when these measures are tested and are found wanting, it wishes to go forward but is caught in the throes of a dictatorship which forces the country to tread water.

– See more at: http://howlround.com/pop-up-performance-in-a-dictatorship-no-problem#sthash.LlMIvqPX.dpuf

Now This Is Not The End: Arcola Theatre

Set in Berlin and London, this is a play as much about migrating energies as it is about the Jewish people. It might be a homage to My Mother Said I Never Should, also about generations of mothers, daughters and granddaughters, haunting memories and quietly kept, even unpalatable  secrets. Unlike Charlotte Keatley’s GCSE set text, which takes place in Manchester and London, Rose Lewenstein’s new play, deftly directed by Katie Lewis, crosses the channel and back again charting the legacy of the traumas of WW2, how the heimat (untranslatable to a certain extent, but meaning a person’s non spatial connection to a place) draws Rosie, a British university student played with the right degree of complacency and seriousness by Jasmine Blackborow, to study in Berlin and fall in love, returning to the city where her half Jewish Grandmother Eva lost her parents to the SS. We jump in time as we meet Rosie’s mother and Eva’s daughter, Susan, living in England and struggling to understand her own relationship with Germany. Eventually Susan tracks down a tape recording adult Eva made of her childhood experiences in Berlin, providing some unexpected and not usually documented revelations and proving cataclysmic for some of the other relationships in the play, the relationships with men.

Daniel Donskoy as Sebastian & Jasmine Blackborow as Rosie

It’s hard not to think that the play’s title takes itself from Churchill’s 1942 speech at London’s Mansion House just after the British defeated Rommel’s forces in Alamein. In fact the play invites us to look at wars and migration in a timely new light and asks us to consider that the effects on relationships, memories, pain, love and procreation, continue long after any war has ended. Things  that are not always translatable into words.

This play goes against the usual route of Jewish victimhood- it is even a celebration of the strengthening of ties across borders- Dan Jeffries’ score reminds us of this. Holly Piggott’s Chuppah like structure hung on the Arcola’s back wall is a continual reminder of  a ‘home’ which the couples: Rosie and her German boyfriend Sebastian, played sympathetically by Daniel Donskoy, Susan and Andrew Whipp’s slightly powerless Paul and even Eva and intense Arnold, eventually come together under. At times the structures light up with Prema Mehta’s neon like empty photograph frames, a symbol for Eva’s missing tape, her emptiness which we would now recognise as PTSD and in time, her dementia. Alternatively, like the contradictory emotions the play throws up, the frameworks are also the outlines of the crematoriums in the concentration camps.

Who has the right to own which memory, its interpretation and decide its authenticity? Susan, whose franticness Wendy Nottingham turns up by volumes as her need becomes more desperate, wants that tape, but for Bernard Lloyd’s Arnold, who is also frantic, the consequences are traumatic, even if based on what could be seen as a throw away comment (here an example of what a character says contradicting how she acts). Love misses a generation, Eva whom Brigit Forsyth imbibes with a horrifying vacuity which negates responsibility, finds more in common with Rosie and can love her, through degrees of separation, much more than she can her own daughter. All women explore the themes of thoughts and feelings being ingested, even a country, through Kaffee und Kuchen and German biscuits and a broken bottle of clothes soaking Schnapps. This ingestion Susan cannot bear, as if Rosie and Eva reaffirm their relationship with Germany by literally eating and drinking it. But the feeling of displacement, seen most in Susan, takes three generations of women to work through, all three copies each others mistakes like a variation on a theme until they eventually get it right through Rosie.

In a play where the structure is built around the frameworks of matriarchy, the men are pushed to one side slightly: but they are mirrors to the strong bonds the women form and the cruelty they impose on them and one another, almost as if bearing witness.

Rosie Lewenstein’s writing allows for the opposite of what is suggested in the text to happen on stage. Occasionally it feels that moments are reached with some beats missing, which hints that the play could probably be longer. But an audience will find itself pulled irresistibly into the vortex of the relationships the women have with each other.

A quiet but deeply complex play, Now This Is Not The End not only illustrates intergenerational mistakes and inherited traumas, it attempts to solve them with some form of redemption, even if that redemption can only be experienced by proxy: i.e by the experiences of someone else.

An eloquent, but harrowing alternative account of the Jewish experience during the Nazi Genocide.

venue: Arcola Theatre  box office: 020 7503 1646/ website  dates: until June 27th.

cast includes:

Brigit Forsyth, Jasmine Blackborow, Daniel Donskoy, Wendy Nottingham, Andrew Whipp, Bernard Lloyd

Directed by Katie Lewis

Designer Holly Pigott

Composer and Sound Designer Dan Jeffries

Lighting Designer Prema Mehta

Design Assistant Anna Kezia Williams

The Cafe Place

The woman came into the cafe as usual after finishing her shift. It was pissing down outside, the rain was unpleasant: it wasn’t cool, crisp and clear, it was thick and sticky, like an unrelenting stream of milk from a mother’s breast. It collated in gravy pools in gutters slimy with rubbish and discarded clothes and shoes.

It made London hot and heavy.

The woman had just finished work in a clothes shop, where she spent all her time skulking in dark corners in the stockroom staring into the black, listening to disembodied voices fall down to her from the pavements above and thinking continually about her mother and how it seemed she didn’t care about her. So to come out into the rain blinking and stupid, was a let down to her, felt personal.

She crossed to the counter as always, looking neither left nor right for fear of seeing someone she knew. If she did, she pretended she hadn’t seen them. She didn’t notice the rows of orange florescent jacketed workers from the building site who gazed surreptitiously at her, eyes going up and down and ending their journey in a little laugh. Nor the groups of women in tight black dresses, with badges swinging around their necks, chatting importantly on their smartphones or on FaceTime.

Today there was nowhere to sit. Her place in the corner, by the window, was taken. It was unusual at this time. Mostly, at 5 o’clock, folks came in groups and sat at tables, or if they were alone, they still shunned the exposure the window gave, as if a day spent in the company of other strangers was enough to exhibit them to the public, and hid in a corner. But today there was a hulky shadow where she normally sat.  Today a bulky figure, draped across the laminated surface dirty with the tea spills and crumbs of others, sat faceless almost, any sense of a head hidden in the crook of an arm, lost, staring out at the rain. Almost as if it had been starved of company.

The woman, disconcerted because it meant she had to be spontaneous, cast a quick eye around the cafe. There was nowhere to sit. But too late, William, the Brazilian, was looking at her, hand raised and ready to pour. He said nothing about the man in her spot as she quickly sucked on the tea, although it was hot. She drank it standing up and fast, one hand limply clinging to the bar. Don’t talk to me, the hand seemed to say to William, who was watching her closely. Once, when he tried to engage her in conversation, she only said she worked in a shop and he daren’t talk again, afraid of her own implied self criticism. But now he was watching and his eyes flicked from her to the shape in the corner. They flicked back to her as if trying to say something. She finished her tea and threw the carton in the bin and began to walk to the door, which was open and gaping despite the rain.

“Hey!” a voice disjointed but standing out like a thin hard line across a blank page because of its volume, made her stop. She thought she sort of recognised an urgency in the tone, a pleading. She carried on walking.

“Hey! Please!” The voice came again.

The woman knew without turning round the voice came from the shape in the corner. She walked towards the voice, she was slight, young looking, although if you looked closely, you’d see a few strands of white hair pushed angrily and fearfully away, hidden under stringy others. The shape at the window hadn’t turned though. It might as well not have spoken, it continued to stare out into the street. The woman glanced nervously back at William, but he appeared not to have heard, although, she could tell by the way he was attentively wiping the counter, that he was listening. She felt reassured although embarrassed- the others in the cafe had barely heard her speak, never mind take centre stage.

She came a bit closer. She thought she recognised the slump of the shoulders, the rather offended air  of the man that boarded on hostility, as if it was beneath him to talk to her and he was cross having to.

“Were you talking to me?” the woman said, voice hoarse, because she did not speak often.

“Yes,” the man almost whispered now. His breath was drawn in short puffy jerks. His left hand nervously tapped the table.

“Well, what?” the woman was abrupt with nervousness for a slow long chill was uncoiling itself like a snake in her bowels.

“Come closer,” the man was impatient now, “I can’t say it out loud.”

Although it wouldn’t matter how quietly he said it, the whole cafe was straining itself to hear, one man even closed the door, to shut out the noise from the street. The bulky figure appeared not to  notice.

The woman, glancing back at William again who was watching but offering no suggestion as to what to do, moved closer. Right by the shoulder, which was plump, right by the ear, with its angry red boil and darkish colour.

“Your mother’s dead” the man said. He paused for a while, still staring out into the rain and then turned, finally, to face the woman. The way he was looking was almost like a challenge, almost a smirk, although it could be taken for nervousness. The woman was looking over the man’s shoulder at the wall behind him. She could see clearly the outline of the brickwork, the blocks stacked patiently on each other like coffins in a morgue, painted white to deny them their individuality. She began to count the bricks. Hadn’t she always said you could look at wall and never see it in the same way twice? She brought herself up short. Was she counting out aloud?

The man was still staring at her.

“You do know who I am don’t you?” the man said, drawing his collar down so she could see better. A bald crown, the wide stern forehead, the hard eyes. The eyes that wouldn’t quite look into hers.

“Oh” she said in reply to the first statement, because she knew something was required of her. Not by the man, who seemed only to care that he was remembered by someone, no matter who, but by the rest of the cafe, whom she knew was listening and because behind all the chatter, there was a tension, it came at end of people’s sentences when there was an unnatural gap through the collective need to eavesdrop.

“Well, aren’t you going to say anything?” said the man, annoyed and irritated now. He reached out and grabbed the woman and pulled her onto the stool beside him.

“Listen you!” he said, his face in hers, “Listen, she’d dead alright! Alright!”

The woman sat alert on the edge of her stool and looked anxiously around. But no one was watching, no one was offering support. The man’s hand was still gripping her wrist, the fingers enclosing around her thin bone like talons. She realised that his finger nails were not cleanly cut as she first thought, but long, curled and yellow. They grazed along her skin.

“You’re hurting” she replied, and tried to slide off the stool.

“Everything and everyone hurts in this fucking life my dear” the man laughed. “Haven’t you learned that by now? Ah, but I see you have. I saw the way you came in, how you lowered your eyes and wouldn’t look at anyone. What is it? Think you are better than everyone else? Frightened someone’s going to find out you don’t add up to much? Think you the only one ever got hurt?”

The cafe held its breath as the rain drizzled murkily now in the dark. No one had ever challenged the woman like this before.

“No, I” she stammered.

“Don’t worry,” he continued. “You’re in good company. We’re alike you and me.”

The woman looked properly at the man now. He eyes seemed nicer for a moment, a gentle face which seemed a little lopsided with a kind of cruelty. Yes, this man could be cruel as much as he could be kind. The man suddenly released her wrist.

“It’s alright, you can go” he said abruptly. “I know that you have no time to spend with an old man like me, nobody does.

And don’t” he continued, as the listening cafe seemed to rise on a tide of laughter coming from the individual waves of their conversations, and as if addressing them although keeping his eyes on the woman, “judge me for my self pity. Yes, I feel sorry for myself, but does that mean I can’t be loved? Does that mean I don’t deserve anyone’s time, that I’m a hopeless case?”

The woman didn’t know what to do. Usually she would have got away from such a madman. But now?  There was something about him that held her. How could he have known she was thinking about her mother when she came in for instance? Of course, it could just be a coincidence, him mentioning her so grotesquely just when she was having intense thoughts about her, but still. The man looked back around at her as if surprised she was still there.

“You said about my mother?” She said.

“You surely don’t take him seriously?” called out William, “He’s a drunk. Babbles on about everything and nothing. He comes in here all the time to sober up.”

The man himself took no notice of William and chuckled.

“Get back to Barbados” said William affably enough. “You can practise all your weird shit there.”

William stood facing the man for a moment, hands on hips. His face wore an expression of exasperation and contempt. He turned away, a smirk on his lips.

“I don’t do no weird shit” carried on the man talking to the woman. “All I speak is the truth as I feel it and see it. And you can either take it or leave it. They all think I am mad around here. But they don’t see the real me. No, they don’t. They just see a – tramp- that’s what they see. And laugh. Because it makes them feel better about themselves. And that ain’t good. Besides, they know nothing about me. Nothing about,” said the man raising his voice so everyone could hear, “how I used to work for a charity in Bombay helping homeless kids get off the streets. You should ha’ seen what I seen. Little kids, boys mostly, thrown into cells 5 feet long for begging or stealing. Open wounds. Flies everywhere. Nothing to eat. Sleeping underneath the trains at night. Was it my fault the job got too much? That I took too many drugs and ended up on the streets myself?  And what about those poor children? What happened to them then? Who cares about them as much as I did now? ”

The man pumped the woman’s arm up and down. She slowly shook her head.

“Well, I’m sorry about that,” she said at last.

“Thank you,” said the man and he bent his head.

“But haven’t you any family?” asked the woman.

To this the man silently pulled out a photograph of a young woman posing outside a university, smiling widely, clinging onto the arm of a taller handsome youth.

“That’s my daughter. That picture was taken by myself ten years ago. Just before I fell ill and I came over here to see her. Not seen her since. Nor heard from her. Missus upped and left a long time ago. Daughter stayed with me. But reckon she gone back to her mother now.”

“That’s not his daughter” said William. “He found that photograph. Right here, in the cafe, last week. Saw it with my own eyes.”

“I dropped that photo. It dropped clean out of my pocket” the man’s face trembled a bit. “If you weren’t such a young ‘un, I’d clean knock your block off” he said to William, still without looking at him.

“Ai ai ai” protested William immediately, putting down the latte he was making and walking out from behind the counter. But he didn’t get as far as half way across the floor. He was after all, a very big man.

“I’ve never hurt anyone,” the man said, “Never been violent.”

“Tcch” Willem tutted, “Any more and you have to leave old man, alright? I’m not having any violent talk in my cafe.”

“It’s not his cafe, he works for a corporate company” the man mocked.

“No matter, anymore and you out OK?”

“Never been known to hurt anyone” said the man again.

A silence reigned for a short time.

“Anyway it would be cruel to turn a homeless man out into the night in this” he suddenly burst out.

“Oh homeless is it now” said William. “I see”.

“I forgive him” said the man with a jerk at this head at the Brazilian. “That what I learned and what I wanted to impart to you. About forgiveness.”

“I don’t need to forgive anyone” said the woman.

“I told you your mother dead” said the man, “And she dead because of how you thinking about her. She dead because you think so bad that to you she is dead, that she ain’t worth living. That to you, she just a woman who don’t bother with you, who make you feel bad, who don’t offer you any support. That what she is. I know it by the ways you walk in here, the ways you carry yourself jus’ like she on you all the time. Jus’ like she here in front of you cussin’ all the time, just like she never left and you never left her.”

“Oh cut the patois man” William said. “Listen,” he said looking at the woman, “I’ve seen him like this with lots of people. Saying the same weird shit. My advice, don’t listen. Don’t encourage him. He’s not saying anything truthful, he is just trying to get you to give him some attention.”

“May be that is what he needs” said the woman, “We all need it sometime.”

William shrugged his shoulders and went back to his customers.

“Anyway it’s not patois” said the man, allowing himself a laugh.

“Then talk your Bajan” said William.

“I said de all yestuhday” replied the man.

William didn’t say anything but carried on wiping the counter. The man resumed his conversation.

“Well, you need to let go is all I’m saying. Your Mamma jus’ like everyone’s and she find it hard like everyone’s and you’re old enough now to see how hard it really is: sure, not through the good times, not when you’re unthinking and happy because life doesn’t test you then, anyone can be happy and thoughtless with it but when you’re unhappy, when you’re alone and life is shitting on you from all directions- you know about that. And so did your mama. Which is why I’m saying. Give her a break. And yourself.”

“I love your mother, even if you don’t” he continued looking at the woman slyly. For a wild moment the woman wondered if he had actually met her.

“I love her” he said again.

“Don’t you see, if I say I do I do because that just lets the energy off right there and then. Right off into the atmosphere. And somewhere, where ever your mother is, she will get that. She won’t know it’s me, but she will feel it- even if she don’t know what it is. Just as, when you have an angry thought towards someone, they feel that to.”

“Yes but, if I feel angry, I feel angry. If I feel love, I feel love. That’s just how it is. That’s life. Nothing I can do” said the woman.

The man carried on looking out onto the street and kissed his teeth. The rain was even heavier, it swirled in the gutters, ran out in rivulets, gushed down the street. People stood and looked helplessly, unable to navigate the pavements in their summer sandals and pulled their sweaters around them as if it were winter.

The man sighed deeply.

“Is that how it is?” he said. “ You know, I loved my mama although it felt like she never loved me. One days it got too much. One days when I was forty, jus’ before I lost my job in India, I traveled back to Barbados to visit my old mama. They said she wouldn’t last long. Well, I had a burning question to ask her. Something that’d been eating me up so long. I said to her, Mama, when my daddy died why didn’t you tell me for so long? Why didn’t you tell me for a year? I was away at boarding school on the mainland see” said the man louder, against all the sniggers.

The woman could tell this was a story they had heard before.

“I hadn’t spoken to her for years because of that. I cut her off, I was only 15 but that was it. I refused to go home in the holidays, I went to an Uncle in New York and that cut my mama’s heart that did. So now, when I asked her, do you know what she said?” The man grabbed at the woman again. “She said, because you never showed us no love son. Never. And when you got to that school you stopped communicating. And I didn’t want to tell you because I was afraid. I was afraid of your reaction, of you not caring. Like my mammy was with me and my daddy, who didn’t care when I told them about bad things happening to me and blamed me instead, I thought you would be the same. So I said nothing to you son, nothing to you. And all those years, all those years of you never answering my calls, pretending I was dead for what I did, never telling me you was married or that I was a grandmommy and now suddenly you are here? And what do you expect? Open arms?”

The man fell silent.

“She died right there and then, as if she’d been waiting to say that to me. And I don’t want to admit it, but it seemed like she was glad. She was glad she got to say it to me and died before I could make it up. She died before I could even say sorry, even say, Mammy, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Mammy, I’m so so sorry.”

The man stopped and the woman saw tears fall down his face with as much force as the rivers of rain outside.

“See how I’m left now?” said the man at last, spreading out his arms in a hopeless gesture. “It was after that, after that I could go on no more. You see nothing made sense no more. Nothing mattered. My job didn’t matter. All that mattered is that I never said sorry, I never made it up before she died. And what’s worse, what’s worse is that she didn’t care whether we did or not. It was her punishment, her punishment” cried out the man, “ that she left me here like this with no hope of redemption, no hope!”

The man fell to his knees and hugged the floor, crying out. Even William threw down his dish cloth in despair.

“Come on man” said William at last as he remained there prostrated on the floor, “Come on, you’re in the way of customers.”

But the man only rolled onto his side and curled into a ball like a cat. The woman hovered, not knowing what to do. She looked around the cafe to see if anyone was interested in helping but everyone was suddenly on their phones, or talking to each other. There was a sneaky click and a phone quickly being put away but even though she whipped around quickly, she couldn’t see who had done it.

“That’s not very nice!” she said loudly, a slight tremble in her voice, for she wasn’t used to speaking out loud to so many people. A man in the corner looked sheepish but no one said anything.

She bent towards the man.

“No, I’m alright” the man said, sitting up. He seemed quite better, as if the outburst had relieved him somewhat.

“You can see what I’m saying can’t you?” said the man, still on the floor. He looked a bit ridiculous with his feet stretched out, in a state of complete acceptance and that it was quite OK to sit on the floor in this way, but the woman had to admit she could see what he meant.

“That woman gave me a prison sentence, don’t let it happen to you. Not with anyone. If there’s something you need to say to someone, if there’s some love you need to give, then do it quick, before it’s too late. Give. You must just give. And even if they don’t accept it, they might remember it someday and be glad.”

The man fell silent and put his head in his hands as if tired out by it. William was going around the cafe offering free coffee. He paused at the man and the woman looked at him.

“He never buys anything” William said.

He stepped over him and went to the counter. He looked out of the window.

“Come on old man, the rain’s stopped” he said. “Your time’s up.”

“Kicking out the homeless”, said the man, “you see him, a young fella’ with no respect for his elders.”

“Tcch, my dad would never get into your state old man” said William.

“Good job isn’t lad?” The man turned and stared at William fully in the face.

“ You can come and stay at mine if you want”, said the woman suddenly. And she really meant it for a moment.

The man looked at the woman gently and cupped her face in his hands.

“I appreciate the offer and that’s nice, but it’s OK. I have somewhere I must go.”

He looked at the woman a long time and then turned and shuffled out of the door, swinging it shut, despite the now sweltering heat.

“I told you, absolutely crazy” said William.

“I wonder if he really did help kids in India?” mused the woman.

William burst out laughing.

“Are you kidding?” he choked, “Look at him!”

“Well, why not?” said the woman.

“Well, why not?” she said louder as no one answered.

“Look at him!” shouted William, “Just look at him! What a state! What a mess for such a person to get in eh? They should lock the door and throw away the key! My parents. My parents are poor but they would never ever get like that. They respect themselves.”

“He could have been” said the woman quietly, defiantly. “I really hope he was and did some nice things for people and has some good things to remember.”

The woman moved to the door seeing it was no longer raining and the sun had come out. She took a look at the cafe. She wasn’t sure if she would come back. William was looking at her in a patch of light, almost as if he knew. Then he shrugged his shoulders, whistled to himself and turned away. It didn’t matter, they’d be others.

The woman swung out of the door, walking a bit taller than when she’d come in.

My Children! My Africa!- Tristan Bates Theatre

Cage up hope on Nancy Surman’s stage for My Children! My Africa! at Tristan Bates Theatre and see what happens.

Athol Fugard’s play set in the later years of apartheid asks, perhaps now the most fundamental question of the 21st Century, what is the best means to overcome oppression? And what is love? Friendship? Betrayal? Forgiveness?  The play has not been revived in London for 25 years but it’s happening now at Tristan Bates Theatre and everyone should go and see it.

Nathan Ives-Moiba as Thami and Rose Reynolds as Isabel

 

Why? Apartheid ended in 1994 and though South Africa is still racked with poverty, inequality, corruption and xenophobia, it is trying to turn its back on a dark painful past and racial segregation that was a part of its legislative fabric since 1948. But, as given voice by Mr M, the kindly Bantu teacher who acts as an idealistic pivot between would be friends high achieving black student Thami and middle class white girl Isabel, it is a reader on how us human beings are more– more than we ever realised, more capable of things than we thought we or each other can be- that we can dare to have hope but yet, how destructive that hope can be, as much as the forces that bring it into being.

Set circa 1985, much of its dramatic structure is made up of scenes where Thami and Isabel, representing their very different schools and experiences, engage in debate: the opening contest sets up hope for South Africa’s modernising as a whole when it puts gender equality at its core. As Thami and Isabel draw intellectually close, Mr M has a chance to put into practise his core ideology- education first, liberation (from apartheid) second. But Athol Fugard fully explores his belief that out of desperate times comes desperate but perhaps emancipating acts (even as designer Nancy Surman’s stage separates the audience with a wall of barbed wire and encourages us to see the characters as actors and that no one is emancipated here, either physically or finally, ideologically- they are, perhaps, only emancipated from themselves into something new). Mr M cannot see that he becomes representative of a regime that must be overthrown (his own and the ruling government). He (Anthony Ofoegbu) as the teacher prances the stage like a caged lion for whom freedom- from the restraints of a humiliating Bantu education system (designed to prevent its black township students from doing anything but the most  menial of jobs) in the form of star pupil Thami, whom he wishes to send to university- comes too late. Thami’s ‘moveness’ away from his mentor and reason and towards the emotional rebelling youthful comrades against apartheid (Nathan Ives-Moiba develops from a gangly boy out growing his school uniform to a hooded street wise youth) Mr M’s betrayal to the authorities out of an inverted spite against himself and others (tragic in its childishness) and Isabel’s inability to understand what it is like to ‘live in a black skin’ destroys- or nearly destroys their friendships. It also sets up the polemic- do we overcome oppression with forces motivated by passion- i.e violence- or do we take the longer path, the one called reason?

But friendship and how it cannot be destroyed by colder barbaric anti human forces is also at the play’s heart here. Athol Fugard is really writing domestic dramas as well. Mr M is a follower of Confucius and the three characters illustrate how one may learn from wisdom according to that man: ‘first by reflection, which is the noblest; by imitation, which is the easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.’ Mr M might well be no.1, Isabel no.2 and Thami no.3. As much as we might be asked by directors Roger Mortimer and Deborah Edgington and the designer to reflect upon ourselves (to feel also what segregation does to us as the audience) and as much as Athol Fugard can be seen as a polemical writer (Los Angeles Times writes ‘flawed Fugard can still be powerful Fugard’) I wonder if we worry much about its perhaps simple story dynamics, messages and roles the characters imbue. We are asked to see the present political degrading system from all points of view and the passion all three actors exhibit- the faith in the text, the belief in their characters and the ardency with which they perform, leaves one at a loss for words.

What’s at stake? It is a picture of how an oppressive society divides humans and tries to destroy and can destroy love. Thami rejects Mr M and all that he has taught him and it breaks that man’s heart. Isabel’s love for Mr M is not allowed- Rose Reynold’s Isabel is innocent, frustrated and, in her attempted hugs of Mr M, seemingly struggling against that regime which supports her but not him.

Athol Fugard believes in genuine confessions, genuine forgiveness. Confessions come all too quickly from these three, so do judgements- Isabel’s notion of Mr M is challenged and found wanting. So too her idealistic vision of Thami- a sort of western romanticism of him (the influence of the West which he so fears at the beginning of the play) and the conditions under which he lives.

Thami wants action to lift the oppression. Mr M wants more peaceful means. Isabel is more provincial, outside the struggle until she is forced to understand South Africa with new eyes.

My Children! My Africa! is one man’s lament for his country’s children (perhaps also Fugard’s). It looks at how society affects our closest relationships, and, more importantly, the potential of those still to be formed. It reframes idealism (if you think Mr M is idealistic) through a realistic lens- and we see, painfully, that Mr M’s notion of achieving peace and equality through the steady, prolonged, lengthy sustenance of education (words are magic: Mr M holds up a dictionary and a rock and says that they both weigh about the same but the dictionary is words and power and the rock is just a rock) is not enough for those who confront the realities of violence as brilliant young men and women who are robbed of their future. The young no longer want to suffer in the same way for the generations to come and Thami must leave the classroom-  all Mr M can do is ring the school bell in defiance.  The theme of hope- for Mr M as destructive as hate or despair- is a double edged sword in African literature- it can alienate and frustrate as well as give one a reason to live. Hope mustn’t be let out of the cage- the cage we have on stage- must it? Fugard seems to be saying- or must it? This is what leads to desperate acts that can emancipate- or not.

In the end, do words speak louder than actions? Is it best to let hope out of the cage and move like a raging animal?  It was a question for South Africa then and it seems to me, a question that seems just as relevant now and for us all.

But don’t forget that Athol Fugard also keeps hold of the idea of love, friendship and reasoned hope at the play’s core. Isabel can at last be close to Mr M though not in the way she imagined. And herself and Thami can still carry the hopes of South Africa on their shoulders and push that country forward, though again, perhaps not in the way they had imagined. And with, tragically, clearer vision.

Deserving to be packed to the doors with critics and audiences alike, this production burns a hole in your heart and your head, but carries you out into the night with careful hope and love. Two Sheds Theatre production of My Children! My Africa! is at Tristan Bates Theatre until 16th May.

Thami – NATHAN IVES-MOIBA
Mr M – ANTHONY OFOEGBU
Isabel – ROSE REYNOLDS

Directors – ROGER MORTIMER & DEBORAH EDGINGTON
Set & costume design – NANCY SURMAN
Lighting design – JACK WEIR
Sound design – ERIN WITTON

further sources

Athol Fugard on aging and apartheid

Athol Fugard on the art of theatre

Athol Fugard on modern day South Africa

Roger Mortimer on directing My Children! My Africa!

This review and others can be seen at Theatre Bubble