AMAJUBA - LIKE DOVES WE RISE: till 26 July
Oxford
AMAJUBA LIKE DOVES WE RISE
by Yael Farber and the company
Oxford Playhouse To 26 july 2003
Runs 1hr 35min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 26 July
Aptly enough, time flies in a piece at once mystical and grittily realistic.
Break this show into its elements, and we've seen it all before.Soulful Black African singing, narration plus physically vivid storytelling, the miseries of Soweto. But no 'room for one more' justification's needed for Oxford Playhouse bringing back the company that created SeZaR a free adaptation of Shakespeare. The intense audience response, finally liberated in a standing-ovation, indicated this is powerful theatre.
Partly because the material's autobiographical; this quintet tell their own stories. There's neither piled-on agony nor folksy romanticism about a society where a woman's tied to a tree and beaten not by secret police, but her father.
A father absconds, claiming the personal property he sneaks out daily in carrier-bags is dry-cleaning. Another encourages his son to steal away and get an education knowledge is the one thing they cannot take from you. But the lad has to evade his mother, who wants him out of school and earning.
A girl's threatened at gunpoint; a young man shot in his backyard. A 'necklace' burning's recreated. The cast's memories are made vividly theatrical an anti-government group stomps through the township; attacked in their tent by soldiers with tear-gas, they writhe under a sheet. Such simple means offer clarity, focussing on the essential experience.
The simple staging's based on tin baths and washbowls. They combine symbolism and reality: growing-up defined as becoming too big to stand in the bowl. Finally, splashing themselves with water, the cast picks up sand thrown over the stage. Arms held out like wings, they let the sands of time fall between their fingers.
For, amid the stories, they're singing - of faith and hope, life's pain never sullying the human spirit. This is no tourist's township guide, or anti-guide. It's a reminder that pessimism is either the death of the human spirit, or a luxury for the comparatively safe and affluent.
Here is life, struggle and survival, expressed through humour and the fascination of strong stories inventively recreated, with the emotional impact of vivid images and soaring melodies. At first, we may think we've seen it all; in fact, there's been nothing quite like this before.
Cast: France Conradie, Tshallo Chokwe, Wendy Sokupha, Phillip "Tipo" Tindisa, Jabulile Tshabalala
Director: Yael Farber
Lighting: Tim Boyd
2003-07-29 09:54:22