Diane de Beer
It’s always interesting when you see a play in isolation after you’ve seen it at a festival among a package of about 36 plays.
It was commissioned by the National Arts Festival after Evans won Most Promising Student Director at 2012’s fest and a Silver at the Standard Bank Ovation Award in 2013. So it has been around a few years to much acclaim.
But to see it on its own raises some questions. It deals with a specific time and specific young people in a very specific place. Two 8-year-olds meet when Andile (Livi) chucks his ball into Amelia’s (Wilson) garden and needs desperately to retrieve it.
It is 1997, a time of Tazos and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and specifically for Amelia, an admiration for Amelia Earhart. What the two children discover is a mutual fascination with an imaginary world. Andile lives in the Republic of Hout Bay and Amelia (though it is never mentioned, and in this land, assumes we know) probably in Hout Bay proper. And still never the twain shall meet. And yet these two are still too young to react to their differences. They only embrace their immediate connection – a love of play and ideas, mostly from their own world.
It’s beautiful to experience these two minds embrace each other in play and the bicycle of the title becomes the object that binds them together – until we leap into the future, both of them dead, but finding a space in each other’s head.
It’s wild and opens up all kinds of possibilities, but in the realm of grabbing onto something, opening it up and exploring different possibilities, this doesn’t happen.
The performances and production work sweetly, with imaginative casting and exposition. The sets are simple, yet manoeuvrable, and light and a string of red wool play their part in unravelling some of what these two kids are battling with.
And yet, as the play ends as abruptly as it starts, and that’s probably the intention, you are left wanting more. What is the audience expected to take from this wonderfully winsome tale other than that misshapen South African landscape, so familiar, where naivety is abruptly shattered by the harsh realities we cannot let go of in this land?
In a country where students are dealing with #FeesMustFall, there has to be more to explore as tensions explode all over the place.