These days, with the ADHD-conducive ubiquity of social media and messages that can appear in your face in a multitude of ways, the cultural imperative has become a shadow of its former self. That imperative which used to say: ‘There’s one last performance of this wonderful piece, and you have to drop everything and see it. Now’ But when it comes to Elzabe Zietsman performing Routrip, in pure and beautiful unapologetic Afrikaans, in this city at last, you just have to switch off the social media, disregard your diary and simply go. Today sees the last performance of this perfect work, a piece which has wowed the country and outlying Afrikaans-speaking communities for over a year. It finally has come to Johannesburg, and this afternoon’s show ends a brief season of just eight performances.
It is here where we meet Helena van Aarde. A collector of talismans from people whom she loved and lost, she is on a path to put an end to it all. The destination? Herold’s Bay, a sleepy little village near George, on the southern coast of South Africa. The vehicle? Her old faithful car.
It’s a long journey, which she must face alone in the wake of a failed suicide attempt, but it’s important that she touches base with all the living and the dead that have formed her. But like the Joseph Campbell iconic traveller, she meets other faces along the way. Important ones, each with their own message: A very young ‘boertjie’ who reminds her of the fitness of her body; a woman named Lindiwe who has dreams of her own that sparkle with optimism, but a heart that is able to see Helena in ways which her own sister-in-law could not; a man named Ian at a bar in Makhanda.
Like the premises of many of the films on the recent European Film Festival in South Africa, Routrip is about one big thunderclap from the universe that gets you to look at what you have with eyes moistened by a special kind of tear. But this is not an ag shame sweet kind of work. The very presence of Zietsman in all the roles, has you alert to her wisdom and feistiness, her quick tongue and her profound sense of humour. There is a moment of utter brilliance involving the delicately and tearfully wrenching of an old lady’s dementia-sodden fingers and a spontaneous very loud fart that is sheer theatre magic, leaving your face, all squeezed up with empathy, bursting into the complexity of laughter that relief brings.
It’s a powerful work that takes an old idea and puffs new and fierce energy into it. It’s about an all-seeing eye missing the rest of Helena’s late grandfather, and a car, which like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history can only reverse at a very crucial time in the journey.
This angel has his face turned toward the past. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” said German philosopher, Benjamin in 1940, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them.”
Can Helena stop reversing and look at the world from another perspective? Or is that wind blowing in from providence too strong to get her to turn around? Above all, this deeply moving work is about the whimsical idea of what time really means.
A long work with difficult family nuances, as a road trip to end all road trips must be, this is a tonic of a work with a devastatingly simple set that will have you transfixed completely on the presences and absences Zietsman creates, from the ants in the anthill to the wisdom of a brother. Don’t miss this beautiful work, whatever you do.
- Routrip is written by Johann Slabbert and directed by Maralin Vanrenen. Performed by Elzabe Zietsman, in Afrikaans, it features sound design by Coenie De Villiers, and is onstage at the Studio Theatre, Montecasino in Fourways for one last performance at 3pm on 20 October 2024.