WHEN YOU ARE able to be present in a huge concrete interior in which one woman and her voice can with clear authority, take control of the whole space, with a packed audience and a vault that reaches storeys into the sky, you know you are in the presence of something extraordinary. James Ngcobo brings contemporary life to American poet, Ntozake Shange’s anthology of women’s tales from the 1970s. For colored girls who have considered suicide//when the rainbow is enuf is a fierce, angry and oft beautiful work which will shake you to your very core, and it’s onstage at the Nelson Mandela Theatre in Braamfontein until 3 March 2024.

Featuring some of this country’s strongest young female voices, the work portrays tales of horror and rape, abandonment and devastating decisions taken by women of colour in their relationships with men, be it the guy waiting for the opportunity to pick you up, when you are drunk and alone, or your abusive husband threatening your children’s lives. It’s about drugs and unfairness, about virginity and being a piece of property ownable by any guy, because he’s male. But more than all of that, it’s about acknowledging your body as your own. And yes, it’s an amalgam of all of those self-empowerment epithets, fashionable now, as they were back in the day, but they’re cliches because they’re truths.

It digresses from the 2010 film based on the same work directed by Tyler Perry, in that there is no clear age discrepancies in the characters who give voice to the text. They are all young. They’re all beautiful. They’ve been carefully schooled in Harlem American, but sometimes you can’t understand the English. You’re able to forgive this as it happens because the tone of the work is so palpable and readable.

The music ricochets across and inflames the enclosed space, in a way that will either enmesh you in its anger or terrify you with its intensity. It’s unapologetic, confrontational and rude, just like Shange’s poetry. And yet, with these young and hard-edged performers, self-confident from the tips of their toes to the last threads of hair on their scalps, something is missing. Whether it is the face of vulnerability or a nuance of something less than white hot anger, the humanity of these storytellers is sapped.

But then, there is Siobhan King, who takes an understanding of characterisation beyond the reaches of a prolonged scream of fury and injects a complex mix of androgyny and loosely threatening humour into one of the tales. She has another moment where her presence, albeit from the very top of an industrial-evocative set, haunts and dominates in a way that will leave you gasping.

This is a work of great potency and beautiful moments of choreography, but remains by and large a static piece, with geometric structures and a set that comprises swivel chairs. Performed, as was William Kentridge’s The Head and the Load, behind the stage’s proscenium, from the outset it disempowers you, in the audience, as it takes you to a place of rawness, as opposed to the plush, safe auditorium itself. Constructed with similarly to Sibikwa’s riveting and important work Chapter 2 Section 9 of 2016, for colored girls is an essay in difficult storytelling and an understanding of how these tales can weave and wind to evoke your own tales of disappointment and horror in the world. It’s an important work, but one for which you need steely focus – in terms of its long, interval-less duration, it’s confrontational aggression and its blurring of linguistic clarity.  

• for colored girls who have considered suicide//when the rainbow is enuf was written in 1976 by Ntozake Shange. It is directed by James Ngcobo and features creative input by Mpho Kodisang and Mandla Mkaba (musical direction); Lulu Mlangeni (choreography); Nthabiseng Nkadimeng (costumes); Yewande James (dialect coach); Andrea Rolfes (audio-visual component); Kyla Swart and James Ngcobo (set); Akhona Bozo (sound); and Enos Ramoroko (lighting), and it is stage managed by Miza Ngaye. It is performed by Thuto Gaasenwe, Danica Jones, Siobhan King, Boitumelo Lesejane, Swankie Mafoko, Refilwe Modiselle, Mona Monyane and Siphesihle Ndaba at the Nelson Mandela Theatre, Joburg Theatre complex in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, until 3 March 2024.