PASSAGE
DIRECTOR: Thando Doni
CAST: Richard Tafane, Aphiwe Menziwa, Jeoffrey Makobela, Nicholas Campbell, Daniel Richards
VENUE: The Flipside, Baxter
UNTIL: March 22
RATING: ***
Thando Doni’s Passage is deliberately open-ended and fluid, a devised piece of work exploring the concept of what makes a man.
It is as if Doni is not trying to hit you over the head with specifics, more trying to wear down your edges.
He is also trying to start a conversation. Commissioned by the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, the work comes as a result of a collaboration between the Baxter Theatre, The Magnet Theatre and the Zabalaza Theatre Festival and has been taken around community centres and schools to get young people to look at the question.
The deliberately diverse cast challenge each other with assumptions and misconceptions, but mostly with their own closely held cultural values.
The Flipside stage is more suggestive than definitive – with a dais on the left containing an armchair and a raised section on the right used as seating.
Using repetition of religious rites and everyday rituals boys pick up from their fathers, it always comes back to the imagery of “men are dogs”.
They explore the different ways they respond to specific situations, like meeting a woman they like or trying to express emotion in appropriate ways.
The harshest ideological clash is over circumcision, which becomes folded into the thorny issue of racial classification.
The issue of homosexuality is also a sticky one, with these two points being the most divisive.
Mostly it comes back to the intransigence of some in not entertaining the notion that someone else’s viewpoint might be valid.
Probably because he is the oldest (at least on the face of it), Richard Tafane ends up being the voice of reason, the one who has to mediate when the inevitable physical violence breaks out.
Every argument quickly descends from name-calling to actual fighting, which is really the point – until men learn to settle an argument with words they will never settle the argument.
Daniel Richards’s training in the Magnet Theatre school is apparent in the way he carries himself, especially when he gives voice to the dog concept, while Nicholas Campbell eventually does provide, if not an answer, a central point to ponder. This is probably the “in” for the workshop process that would follow the play when not performed in a traditional theatre space.
There is no central narrative, no “aha” moment or dénouement, but what the play does achieve is a slight shift in the way you look at the question – because varying viewpoints are placed next to each other right in front of you, it makes it that much harder to say one is correct and the other wrong.
• Performed in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa.