DIE KRISMIS VAN MAP JACOBS
DIRECTOR: Alfred Rietmann
CAST: Christo Davids, Cedywn Joel, Royston Stoffels, Charlton George, Ferdinand Williams, Shameelah Ismael, David Johnson, Vaneshree Lingham, Jackie van der Heever, Loukmaan Adams
VENUE: The Artscape Theatre
UNTIL: May 14
RATING: ****
Compact and compelling, Die Krismis van Map Jacobs gives an insight into what people will do to make a better life for themselves.
Set against the backdrop of forced removals, the one-act play of about 75 minutes is based on a 1983 book by Adam Small.
The scenes shift quickly with melancholic musical links moving the action along for the Twitter generation’s short attention span.
Watching the play surrounded by schoolchildren – it is a matric setwork – is quite the fun experience since they volubly love the fact that they recognise some of the actors and are absolutely scandalised by people swearing on stage. They’re also not shy about saying what they don’t like, a case in point being one girl behind me who was clearly unimpressed by one actress’s crocodile tears.
While the original book emphasised the physical circumstances and socio-economic state of affairs, the play truncates the events and concentrates on the possibility of redemption and forgiveness.
It tells the story of Map Jacobs (Davids convinces as a hardened criminal), a jailed vicious gang boss searching for redemption. His story unfolds as the action takes us back and forth between jail and outside and through time as well. Map’s woeful tale is as much about forgiveness as it is a striking picture of exactly what life was like on the Cape Flats during the early 1970s as a now rootless people tried to make sense of their new surroundings.
While Map finds redemption in the arms of the Lord, the people he affected have moved on along a different path and he has to negotiate a way through his own guilt and their search for identity and place in the world.
A trio of Map’s karom-playing (karom is game similar to pool, played with discs) friends act as a Greek chorus of sorts, setting the scene and furthering your understanding of the play’s milieu and the characters’ backgrounds.
There is Map’s erstwhile girlfriend Blanchie (Ismael) and her father Mr Cavernelis (Joel), who pushes her into some dodgy deals in the name of making enough money to get off the Flats.
Mr La Guma (Johnson), though initially the character who seems the most likely to elicit derision from Map’s friends, turns out to be the one who sees to the heart of Map’s dilemma.
He gives voice to a hitherto unvoiced bitterness and pain of people whose history has been bulldozed and identity destroyed.
The play examines how apartheid scarred the coloured identity, using music to entertain and lighten the mood, but it never belabours the point either.