TSHEPANG. To 16 October.
London
TSHEPANG
by Lara Foot Newton
Gate Theatre To 16 October 2004
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Sun 10 October 6pm no performance 9 October
Runs 1hr 15min No interval
TICKETS: 020 7229 0706
Review: Timothy Ramsden 8 October
Finely acted, imaginatively staged but the undoubted humanitarian impulse behind this piece has a more ambiguous impact.This play forms part of playwright/director Lara Foot Newton's academic achievement at the University of Witwatersrand. If that's a silver lining, the cloud it describes is deep black.
The number of child-rapes like that eventually uncovered in Newton's narration is said to be great in South Africa. The scenario itself can be found round the world, certainly in Britain, one where the culprit was the mother's male partner. As friendly Simon (for whom, verbally, this is a near monologue) says, it's easier to have discardable unmarried partners than wives you're stuck with. And if the mother's disposable, it's not far to regarding the baby as bathwater too.
Simon's trade is figurines (trade isn't good); a number stretch across the stage, including a Holy Family that finds room for Jesus' sister. And there are model homes, out of them growing stalks bearing sunglasses. People as objects, property and business combine in the staging. Bread acquires gruesome sexual uses, including a fierce representation of a rape, a basic food transformed into first a crude, then barbaric, representation of the life-creating process.
Visually, it's not a one-man show. Silent almost throughout is Ruth, who has not spoken for 3 years since she was vilified for neglecting Tshepang, exposing her daughter to danger. Compulsively clawing the ground as if to bring about her child's return from care, carrying a model bed on her back symbolising her guilt, she reacts only when Simon refers to her baby by name.
For all the staging ingenuity and the dramatic organisation, there's a collision between the documentary facts and the skilful manipulation of mood and revelation, which comes dangerously close to hauling in documented real-life horrors to help build dramatic force. No doubt the intention's the other way round to use drama to explore terrible deed that have happened and continue to occur.
But the carefully provoked curiosity at Simon's references to an as-yet unspecified incident in Ruth's past fascinates a desire for plot revelation that seems to draws fact into the artistic scheme, thereby exploiting it, something amplified in the subsequent detail of Ruth's guilty self-mutilation.
Simon: Mncedisi Shabangu
Ruth: Kholeka Qwabe
Director: Lara Foot Newton
Designer: Gerhard Marx
Lighting: Royden Paynter, Wesley France
Assistant director: Leila Hendriques
2004-10-10 14:39:43