This latest offering from the unofficial South African festival in London at the moment is a theatrical miracle. No water is turned into wine, but a single watermelon, some paper and two bald men magically transform themselves into the birds, animals and humans of a small South African community torn apart by rape.
Childlike, quirkily playful and occasionally devastating, this production toys with the audience's visual reality so that it is impossible to know what to expect next. One man taking a piggy-back ride tweets, chirps, and kisses the other man's bald head, so that a bird in a tree is evoked with surprising effectiveness. Seeing is believing: later a watermelon is ripped open so that the onlooker experiences the visceral reality of a birth.
Here, you realise, are two theatrical chameleons. Blink, and where there was a gurgling baby, now stands a society prude with nothing but her pearls and endless cups of tea to declare. Blink again, and there is Flo, the central tragic figure in a rape story that powerfully uses the tools of magical realism to express her simultaneous shame and desire for revenge.
The audience is lulled into the story with a sense of comedy that makes the rape itself all the more shocking. Huge sheets of paper trail across the stage and before long, the
two actors are ripping it up and one is screwing the paper up and stuffing it into his clothes to give himself the requisite boobs, buttocks and child-bearing hips to turn him into a strange object of desire. This comic scene turns to horror when the rapist - a clergyman - pulls the fake boobs off and stuffs them into Flo's mouth to stop her screaming. The descent from bonhomie to brutality is devastating.
The performers, Lionel Newton and Andrew Buckland, together with their director, Lara Foot Newton, have created a production that demonstrates the potency of theatre as a playground of the imagination. After 10 minutes, you wonder if they can sustain this level of inventiveness, but they dispel all worries with a show that quirkily evokes unexpected shades of the emotional register.
The Well Being
