Maqoma’s work has a tendency to leave you trembling in anguish. It’s an earth shattering experience you might not be able to rationally find the vocabulary to describe. How could it be possible to say so much with just music and movement? Genesis may take you deeper you believe possible.
Ramsay is utterly formidable in this role, which brings out an immense yet delicate sense of nobility coupled with almost crippling vulnerability, and all hidden beneath the tight facade. With a profile rendered regal and indomitable by an astonishing a wig, Ramsay paints a Callas fearless, cruel, funny, irrepressibly human.
The text is penned by people much younger than Homer, which presents a flattening of the old narratives, and a simplifying of them into platitudes of anger that sees the bashing up of guys perceived to be worthy of a good bashing up, or better still, a very violent death.
Featuring phenomenal performances by Alice Findlay, Oratile Manamela, Nicola Shapiro and Ketsia Velaphi, it takes on the repetitive nature of a boarding school ethos, punctuated by gossip and politics, lessons which are both rote-based and morally confusing, and the drugs, sex and other illegal experiments conducted in the school’s interstices.
In terms of power she wields both as a character and a performer, Mpume Mthombeni as Nomsa is God in a pair of 1950s-evocative horn-rimmed specs and a dress appropriate to a middle-aged woman. She carries the world on her head and can invoke humility or catastrophe with a gesture.
You don’t come away complacent from this work. Is it assaultative? Absolutely. Relatable? 100%. You feel broken, body and soul as you emerge from it. You laugh with recognition at the dark tropes and you sweat with a personal dread at where this work may go, as you experience it.
With all of its apparent chaos, the story lines in Daniel Buckland’s Afropocalypse are crystal clear and the surreal topsy-turvy values articulated from the idea of an African apocalypse are held sacred and gorgeous. And not a little scary, at times. Be prepared to give tears and laughter on cue.
Gofaone Bodigelo is a Medea who is angry to the point of blindness, but she never loses her sense of being a woman wronged rather than a witch. It is, however, the chorus: 17-year-olds Natasha Dube and Malcom Moloi that leave you shattered by the sheer potency of their performances.
The question of a baby is answered severally as the play unfolds. It’s an answer concerning life, the universe and everything, rather than being about The Right Thing to Do at this time in a relationship. ‘Lungs’ takes us right through life’s trajectory, and it’s agonisingly relatable, whatever your age.
It’s a work sophisticated in its thinking, crude in its extrapolation. It speaks from the belly. While you’re guffawing with embarrassed recognition, the goosebumps on your skin rise; you feel feverish at the narrative underlying the words which subverts the dry face of statistics and shouts the ugly hypocritical truths.
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