INHERENT END. Directed by Kim Kerfoot, with Tamarin McGinley, with dramaturgical assistance by Kati Francis. At The Alexander Upstairs theatre, Tuesday to Thursday at 7pm. STEYN DU TOIT reviews.
Tamarin McGinley’s Inherent End tells three stories simultaneously, each one intriguing enough to supply a full play on its own.
In the first we meet 11-year-old Stacey Venter, who, 60 years ago, first made her appearance as the title character in Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel, Lolita.
Against the backdrop of lazy porch swings, dusty gas stations and unfiltered Americana, the book chronicled her sexual relationship with a literature professor in his (very) late 30s.
Fast forward to the mid-90’s. Stacey/Lolita now finds herself, in addition to her mentioned extra-curricular activities, also trying to survive the Y2K countdown, dungarees as fashion and the rise of online dating.
Thanks to the internet, no longer do sexual predators have to go out in search of their prey either. Instead, all one has to do is simply log (anonymously) into an internet chatroom and take your pick of girls like Stacey.
“Things must be different in America,” the teen lets slip between gushing over Demi Moore in Striptease and Rob Estes in Silk Stalkings.
“The rules here are ‘the kid stays with the mom’. Even if she doesn’t want her. That’s what my dad told me when he left.”
Presented by the Instant Arts Collective and directed by Kim Kerfoot, the second story told in this often dark-humoured play revolves around an unnamed woman who develops an unhealthy attraction/obsession towards someone she befriends online.
A product of parental and societal neglect, we can see early on that she’s too far down the road to even think rationally about what she’s doing. Thanks to her wit and personality, however, we begin to see that, above all, it is the need to be loved that drives her actions.
Performed throughout by McGinley, in the production’s final story a scientist prepares to give a TED Talk.
Arguing that it is not only physical traits such as hair colour or bone density that can be passed on from parent to child via DNA, her talk motivates that the same can also be said of emotional experiences or mental trauma.
“Put simply, [epigenetics] is the study of heritable changes in gene expression,” she tell us while practising her speech in front of the mirror. “Changes that sit on, epi, the genes. Hence epigenetic.”
Told through monologues, digital projections and a stream of consciousness, how Inherent End’s three characters relate to each other, or whether they are, in fact, three different people at all, make for an interesting 65-minutes of theatre.
In addition, through McGinley’s arresting performance, the piece also asks its audience to consider universal matters relating to relationships, sexuality, human behaviour, the nature of morality, biology and psychology.
While it’s not necessary to have read Nabokov’s Lolita in order to understand this piece, I did find that being familiar with the novel helped me draw similarities between the narratives easier, as well as help me follow the action on stage faster.
Both as a playwright and as an actor McGinley displays a range of skills and interesting ideas. Successfully adapting a well-known story into one of modern relevance is no mean feat. Yet she succeeds because she understands that the best kind of theatre is not always about reinventing the wheel. Sometimes one just has to spin it at a contemporary speed.
First staged in London last year at Camden People’s Theatre, while there certainly is no lack of bravery or content in the play, it is also admittedly not “easy” viewing – both in terms of script as well as in presentation.
Finding tweaks to making both aspects more accessible to a wider audience is perhaps something that could be considered for future runs.
That said, for those who like life to a little more abstract and a little less paint-by-numbers, Inherent End might prove to be an interesting and unique trip to the theatre.
It is also a great opportunity to see a formidable duo (Kerfoot and McGinley both graduated from UCT in 2007) embark on what will hopefully become a long and prosperous creative partnership.
“They fuck you up, your mom and dad. They may not mean to, but they do,” Philip Larkin writes in his poem, This be the Verse.
“They fill you with the faults they had. And add some extra, just for you.”
Part confessional, part discourse and part innocence lost, you only have until Thursday to go see what Inherent End’s programme means when saying its characters will “straddle the gaps between victim and predator, circumstance and action, innocence and guilt.”
l Tickets: R80 to R90, 021 300 1652, www.alexanderbar.co.za