STRAIGHT off a very successful run at this year’s Edinburgh Assembly Fringe Festival, Aubrey Sekhabi’s thriller Silent Voice comes to Cape Town for a short season.
Sekhabi (pictured below) the artistic director of the State Theatre, and four actors arrive in Cape Town today and hit the ground running with their first performance on Monday. The four cast members are Zenzo Ngqobe (Rhythm City), Boitumelo Shisana (Cards, Tshepang), Tshallo Choke (Bopha, Woza Albert) and Don Mosenye (Generations). Presley Chweneyagae (Tsotsi, Relativity, Township Stories) will take over the role from Chowke from October 27 to November 1.
They started the production at the beginning of July in Grahamstown, then moved to Mafikeng and Witbank before travelling to Edinburgh in August.
The play received good reviews in the Scottish newspapers, but it was the word of mouth Sekhabi thinks really got them noticed at the festival. He got the chance to speak to some people after their performances about what they liked about the piece: “People liked how it was made, they felt it was very bold, that we pushed the envelope, that it was not conventional.”
Still, all the attention wasn’t just sunshine and roses: “Also, they felt it was scary and made them nervous, because of the violence. That scared a lot of people,” said Sekhabi.
Silent Voice is about four men on the run after a botched heist. It tries to get into the silent thoughts of the characters to somehow understand their actions.
“The story is fiction, but it’s a representation of what happens in real life. I’ve never been in a heist, but it’s what we’ve heard and read,” he explained.
Originally, while writing Sekhabi spoke to a few ex-convicts, but that was so that the actors could understand the mentality behind their characters. And, of course, each of the actors put their own spin on the characters.
The version we now see in Cape Town, the one that’s been travelling, is slightly different to the first incarnation back in the late 1990s. Sekhabi is well known for constantly tinkering on productions until he has it just right, but this one was deliberately changed.
Part of his job description as artistic director of the State Theatre is to direct at least two plays a year and when he realised he could make use of a recent brief from the Department of Arts and Culture to tour a production, Sekhabi decided on this 1998 hit.
Now, instead of concentrating on the build-up of training for and execution of the heist, this version looks at how the men unravel after the fact. Originally, he was inspired to write the play because he realised that he had actually gone to high school with people who had been arrested for heists and robberies and he was fascinated by why they were where they were, and he was where he ended up: “So, I thought, what an interesting subject.”
• Silent Voice is at the Batter Golden Arrow Studio from Monday to November 1 at 8.15pm. A matinee on October 18 at 2pm. No under-14s due to the language and violence.