This tale is rich with the peculiar smell of crocheted hanger covers and the cloy of biscuit tins with crumbs and some rust in the seams. It’s about embracing ageing without the constraints of vanity, and it is about letting go and laughing from the very bottom of your belly.
There are times in ‘Prima Facie’ when you aren’t sure if it is your own heart-beat you’re aware of, or whether it is the play’s soundscape. Suddenly it is not really Tessa Ensler’s story any more. It’s yours. It’s that of the woman sitting next to you. It’s your sister’s.
In a country plagued by alcoholism and suicide, David Ireland’s ‘The Fifth Step’ directed by Charmaine Weir-Smith at the Baxter Studio Theatre in Cape Town, brings a richly potent conversation to the forefront without drowning you in stats or sadness. It is beautifully performed by Albert Pretorius and Lyle October.
While all the niceties are in place for gossipy titbits in the English village of King’s Abbot, where Roger Ackroyd lives, you will wish for more of Gertrude Ackroyd (Louise Saint Claire) with her over-the-top personality as she empties her whisky into a teacup and pretends, with fiery hair, nonchalance.
Directors Gerard Bester and Sibahle Mangena facilitate the cast of over 30 teenagers, aged between 13 and 19, to voice their opinions about complex social issues the work is tight, it has levity and it will seesaw you through every kind of emotion you have in you. Don’t wear mascara.
Roland, a toilet paper king in the business world and an unfinished musician in his heart is stuck in the mountains. The weather’s uncooperative; his phone’s battery is depleted. With not even a jersey to offer him succour, he resigns himself to letting his thoughts take him where they must.
Picture the scenario: A brand new high-end suburban complex with all the checks and balances that define privileged living. Everyone tiptoes around everyone else with a developed sense of conversational hygiene, carefully clicking every ‘c’, ‘x’ and ‘q’, with different parts of tongues not used to doing such things.
The high end musical Pretty Woman never pretends that the arrangement between Vivian and Edward is anything other than what it is. She’s a prostitute; he’s a rich guy. It is a deal, and both of them know it. But knowing something and feeling it are two different things.
Jessica Haines’s play is a twisty yarn that reaches gingerly from the feral fluffy boundaries of childhood, into the complexities of growing up in a world where ‘perfect’ is forced as a binary and compliance with the notion of what ‘perfect’ might mean can point imperatively to self-mutilation, or worse.
It acknowledges and celebrates the flow of gravity and of fabric and the use of the fingers, hair and the expressions of the face in the material. And with all the sturm and drang of excesses and morals, values and torment, the dancers are consistently deliciously light on their feet.
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