‘MUMMY, I’M AFRAID. I can’t find your house and the police are looking for me.’ It’s a terrible moment when a man, having lived his life, and now on the very edges of dementia, forgets the context. Is the striking young woman who has come to see him, his mother? In truth, she’s his daughter. In an astonishingly beautiful tribute to her father, Bo Petersen presents Pieces of Me, a deep and rich understanding of racism and love, at the Suidoosterfes in Cape Town on 3 and 4 May 2025.

The story’s also about how you reconstitute your sense of self after discovering a truth that lies so deep and has been covered so carefully, that it changes the you that you see in the mirror. When Petersen was just 19, in the mid-1970s, she discovered that her father had passed for white, all her life, in a country where racism was legally enforced.

This extraordinary work is something that has been boiling in Petersen’s belly for her whole professional career and it comprises vignettes of a lifetime that are forever emblazoned in her memory. Issues of not knowing why an auntie and cousins couldn’t join her and her siblings in a public pool. Issues of not being able to understand unspoken but monumental rifts between aunties. Issues of home-made ginger biscuits as a suture for disappointment. And issues of having to make peace with the shards left by beloved dead people, and having to understand the horror of taking a personal decision that would forever be haunting.

It’s not a unique story, or one specific to apartheid South Africa. A man leaves a homeland, a life, a community, filled with personal history, parents and siblings; he leaves knowing he will never see them again, because he must seek a life away from persecution. He takes the decision based on a happy future for his children. But it’s something that may come knocking on the door, a generation down the line.

It’s just over 30 years since democracy came into being in South Africa. Theatre audiences are two generations away from lived apartheid. The value of this work as a nuanced understanding of life under racist rule cannot be understated.

Petersen’s work is bold and clear. Her interpretation of her aunts and grandmothers brings goosebumps, and lays open the issues of family resentments and mumbling secrets that are oft hidden in dark places, from children. The thing that turns siblings, as adults, away from one another; the thing that taints some cousins less worthy than others. And yet, in self-consciously bringing herself as a performer, as one who has the skill to climb into another character from the shoes up, she lends a sense of objectivity, universality to the tale.  

It’s a brave work. Telling your own story with all its delicate veils of family nuance is never easy. The “I” in the tale can be tyrannical and cause more damage than healing. In the hands of a consummate storyteller, this portrayal of apartheid and of her father is compassionate and complex. You weep with empathy, and you stave off judgement as you embrace the difficulty of context.

It’s an important work that presents itself as much a history lesson about the vagaries of drawing lines between people because of skin – or hair, or mannerisms, or ritual practices, or beliefs – as it stands as personal narrative. Because Petersen is a seasoned performer with a whole career of work behind her, Pieces of Me is endowed with gravitas that makes it sing. This is no one-production performer, in the way that monodramas of the ilk of Tasmin Sherman’s My Weight and Why I Carry it, or Micaela Tucker’s Doll’s Life threaten to be. This is a storyteller who, at the peak of her career, has the courage to take it by the horns, at the risk of everything.

Pieces of Me is directed by Royston Stoffels. Written and performed by Bo Petersen, accompanied on keyboard and with whistling by Christopher Petersen and produced by Yvette Hardie, it performs at the Suidoosterfees at the Artscape Theatre, on 3 May at 20:30 and on 4 May at 09:00.