FRUIT
Playwright/Director: Paul Noko
Cast: Matshediso Mokoteli
Venue: Masambe Theatre at the Baxter
Until: August 29
Rating: ****
An enchanting raconteuse, a doll, some stones, and a compelling script… no wonder Paul Noko’s Fruit has emerged as winner of the 2015 Best of Zabalaza Theatre Festival. With paucity of means and outstanding inventiveness, this one-hander about the quest for lost innocence represents a theatrical tour de force.
Matshediso Mokoteli has the stage presence to engage her audience unreservedly, as well as the youthful vulnerability and slight build to convince as a girl just entering her teens; her persona is 14 years old.
A bland-faced doll named Lucy is the confidante to whom she imparts the experiences she has undergone growing up in Diepkloof, with the audience a secondary recipient of her revelations.
Much of her extended monologue’s charm is due to its unexpected blend of naivety and uncompromising realism: because of her youth, the girl, Matlakala, views her social milieu with the non-judgemental freshness of a child, but at the same time she has the intelligence and clarity of vision to identify it for what it is.
Crime, violence, and drunkenness are its cornerstones – and speaking of stones, she uses 16 of the latter, each one bearing a crude but evocative depiction of a human face, to represent some of the individuals peopling her world. The surroundings in which she grew up are reconstructed with a few simple objects to hand: here a church, there the home of a notorious crook, suggesting a children’s game. But there is nothing child-like in what befalls her, and her virginity does not long survive her reaching puberty.
This is a sensitive subject, and it is handled with great delicacy, although we are left in no doubt as to Matlakala’s fate. Her recital has the value of a catharsis and what emerges from her reaction to being violated is resilience as well as hope, the ability to move on.
Natural imagery is used to enhance the drama, hence the child-woman’s febrile attempts at the beginning of the play to reconnect an avocado to the tree from which it was plucked. The suggestive shape of this fruit, its inner succulence and rough-skinned exterior, make it an apt choice of image. So is that of the seed, symbolic of future life. She asserts that a seed cannot be buried, in the sense of interment after death. If it is put in the ground, it can sprout and grow into new existence – and therein lies the moral of this poignant but edifying work.
Fruit offers its audience a mere 45 minutes of drama, but every one of them is packed with emotion, some humour, and much to provoke thought long after exiting the theatre.