KWA-NONGQONGQO. Written and directed by Mhlanguli George, with Livie Ncanywa and Athenkosi Mfamela. WHITE GUILT. Written and directed by Justin Nurse, with Oliver Booth and Schalk Bezuidenhout at the National Arts Festival until Sunday. TRACEY SAUNDERS reviews
THE National Arts Festival becomes the centre of theatre in South Africa for 11 days in winter. Productions from the length and breadth of South Africa and several international pieces have been showcased at this, the 40th edition with many of the productions from Cape Town performing to sold-out houses.
Two new plays were recently performed in Cape Town and while they are both stories of two young men bound together by criminality they couldn’t be more different.
Kwa-Nongqongqo is set mostly in a prison cell and both the space and the lives of the inmates are confined and limited.
The play was originally performed as part of the Madiba Magic Festival in 2012 curated by Mandisi Sino.
Since then the initial short play has been developed into a full-length script and while there are only two actors on stage, the presence of the other pawns in this particular game is brought vividly to life.
Mac starts out as a petty criminal while hustling as a hawker at train stations and fleecing his unsuspecting customers with wit and flair.
This paves the way to a life of more serious crime and it doesn’t take long for him to progress to armed robbery.
His fellow prisoner has a darker past and the two become bound together by the strange camaraderie of a shared cell and share their dreams and fears. As with George’s other scripts there is an unexpected twist and when it comes the blow is delivered suddenly, abruptly, and you leave the theatre feeling slightly punch drunk.
He lays bare the harsh reality encountered by many youth, the dismal future faced by those whose journey through the education system leaves them woefully ill-prepared for life.
His characters are scoundrels, misfits and yet one can’t help but feel compassion and a heartfelt sadness at their almost predictable and dismal future.
The director has been teaching African Dance Theatre Performance Technique at UCT and his affinity for physical theatre is evident in the directorial choices. The actors use dialogue, movement and their own shadows to maximum effect in a haunting and soul-searching piece.
The two miscreants in White Guilt, however, engender neither compassion nor care.
The pair of middle-class wannabe “gangsta” drug barons, dressed in the obligatory anonymity of matching hoodies, lurch from one drug deal to another until one goes horribly and predictably wrong.
The sense of one long bad trip is heightened by the use of a digital backdrop that allows the story to travel from a drug factory in Port Elizabeth to the steps of the Constitutional Court.
There are props galore and the story line about copyright infringement of a coffee blend mirrors Nurse’s own personal legal battles.
He has leant heavily on biographical details, much of which cannot have been an emotionally easy exercise, but the authenticity is marred by the forced attempts to shock.
Audiences expecting a treatise on the TRC or a study on race relations will be sorely disappointed.
This is a meditation on a different type of white privilege. Despite the slick one-liners that litter the text, the script feels clumsy and the thread of misogyny that weaves through the narrative is unpalatable at best and degrading at its worst.
Familiar to many for the tagline on his popular “Black Labour, White Guilt” T-shirts the writer is known for testing the limits of free speech and perhaps this play is just that, an attempt to see how far one can stretch constitutional privilege on stage.
It is billed as a bromance. One is tempted to read the text ironically, but on closer inspection it fails on that count. His insistence on using the word gay as an insult and slur comes across as a heavy handed attempt to prove a point, and not terribly successfully.
The homophobic reference is repetitive and eventually becomes a tiresome bon mot which sours the narrative. On a continent where the label of homosexuality is punishable by death it is not an adjective which can be treated lightly.
Many sacred cows are thrown on the fire, and a few are skinned alive, some, such as drug-fuelled sexual fantasies, less impressively than others. It takes a skilful writer to wield the satirical pen and a script requires more than a sequence of clever sketches to capture an audience.
Here the twist in the tale is not unexpected and when the cocksure J-Bone meets his moment of reckoning there is little in the reservoir of sympathy. Directing work that one has written is a theatrical challenge that few are able to meet successfully and the duo’s potential is not fully explored.
Booth was last seen as one of the rambunctious bears in the comedy Champ where he displayed his comic mettle which is sadly underutilised here.
Bezuidenhout has a sardonic sense of comedy timing and his delivery while engaging and interesting promises more.
If you are looking for a sampling of Grahamstown’s good, the bad and the ugly add these two plays to your schedule. You are sure to be moved or offended, but ambivalence is not an option.
l Kwa-Nongqongqo is at PJ’s and White Guilt is at Vicky’s. See www.nationalartsfestival.co.za