THE CHAMPION
DIRECTOR: Khayalethu Mofu
CAST: Khayalethu Anthony
VENUE: Golden Arrow Theatre, Baxter Theatre Centre
UNTIL: Wednesday
RATING: ****
Cape Town - Khayalethu Anthony pours himself heart and soul into his performance in The Champion. He gives us a terrific and terrifying insight into the mindset of a man who knows he is abusive, but can’t stop himself. So often we get on stage the story of what it feels like to be abused, but seldom do we get a glimpse into the mind on the other side.
The play is all about internal contradictions and conflicts and how our parents can really mess us up, even long after they’re gone.
The monologue (in the sense of one voice, not boring rhyme and meter), also written by Anthony, won him a Best Production award overall plus awards for Best Script and Actor at this year’s Zabalaza Festival, and I caught the production at the Cape Town Fringe Festival.
With a set cluttered with the accoutrement of a very tiny house, it is a work well-suited to the intimate space of the Baxter’s Golden Arrow Theatre. He is seated at the table when we enter, in the classic throes of a babalas of note, nursing his half-jack of vodka, scowling at the world.
Over the course of almost an hour he potters around the house, making his bed, brushing his teeth, throwing himself on to a stuffed chair with economic grace and then jumping up with a nervous energy and pacing around the tiny space.
All the time he is talking to himself, questioning his path in life in colloquial English with a bit of Xhosa thrown in every now and then. They may be heavily existential questions – Why am I? Who am I? – but they are delivered with the clarity of plainspeak.
Anthony plays the character of Thulani who is trying to get to grips with his here and now by thinking of way back when. He breaks the fourth wall in that he is addressing the audience as he tells us about his mother, but mostly he is talking to himself, mulling through ideas about her relationship with various men.
Growing up he didn’t get to know his biological father and had a strained relationship with the men his mother introduced into the family (he also talks about a younger brother and sister).
He is wistful about learning what it means to fight from the man who gives the play its name, confused when he acknowledges he doesn’t particularly like this manipulative person who is his mother, lost when his teenage self realises that there are no adults willing to take responsibility for him.
He conflates these thoughts about growing up with a narrative around the relationship he has with a girlfriend – a relationship informed by all his relationships that have gone before, broken as they may have been.
By the time Thulani reaches the point where he tries to grasp what he feels when he beats this woman and he throws the questions at the audience – Where were you when this was happening? Why didn’t you stop me? – his anger is palpable.
Anthony keeps the emotion tightly bottled up – it’s a controlled performance – but there, right at the end, it’s not some maniacal psychopath from an OTT Tarantino film losing the plot; it’s a very real person, a broken little boy, that is angrily asking “why?” and not able to answer because all he has is his emotion and nothing else.
* The Champion carries an age restriction of 14.