With an energy that evokes Jenna Ortega, the performer who took on Wednesday Addams and turned her from a cameo into a series, and an ownership of a beautiful text evocative of the presence Cara Roberts casts over The King of Broken Things, Crafford-Lazarus becomes Olivia, the girl in question.
Replete with cruelty, nakedness, burning incense and song that will reach into the very chambers of your heart, ‘The Black Circus and the Republic of Bantu’ is much more of a ritual than a spectacle. You emerge from the experience with a seismic sense in your gut. Something has happened.
Malo is a tale about a clown with heart, a ringmaster with a whip and a moon with a maiden in it. It’s about love – love gained, love lost and love gossiped about on a celestial journey peppered with strong-man tactics, fire eating, Honeymanesque puns and lots of aerial dancing.
‘Master Harold’ is about the love and the shame and the hate that gets rolled into one messy stream of anger in the face of caring for a broken parent. And it is about the way in which a primal gesture can so sully a conversation that it annuls it.
Life, death, betrayal and the heaviness of loss were brought onstage to Johannesburg high school students in the form of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Armed with pure use of period language, a deep understanding of purpose and meaning and a rich clarity of narrative, they were perfect.
In Mike van Graan’s ‘The Good White’, the pieces are all in place for an explosive denouement. Add a bit of protest performance, the demon of gender-based violence, and some shenanigans in the wrong bedroom, and you get the picture: It’s a scenario tense with energy and brittle with distrust.
Prowse’s career was remarkable. She canoodled with the biggest names in the biz, but she gave blood, sweat and tears to her craft in hefty doses and her niece does her proud in not oohing and aahing with platitudes, but in giving an exceptional life feasibility without rendering Prowse godlike.
In ‘Black Coffee’, everything, from a complete colour wheel of deadliest poison, to the toby jug in the room, to the sub-plot of secret plans for a bomb, not to forget the costumes and pin curls of the era, is perfectly handled. This is a well-made play at its best.
In Lucas Hnath’s ‘A Doll’s House Part 2’, there is empathy and fierceness in the give and take between social values. Zane Meas opposite Bianca Amato is splinteringly fine in his masculine vulnerability and sense of impotence with a softened edge of reconciliation for the damage that mansplaining can bring.
Telling your own story with its sensitive veils of family nuance is never easy. The “I” in the tale can be tyrannical and cause more damage than healing. Bo Petersen’s portrayal of apartheid and of her father’s choices is compassionate and complex. You weep with empathy; you stave off judgement.
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Geoff Sifrin
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