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.
From teen girls dangerously ready for life in a world beset with the joys and terrors of being alive in 2010 to a lone driver some years later, trapped in her safety belt, the thread of humanity is cast in the hands of a police detective: And the result? Dynamite.
In ‘Stinkhout’, Frank Opperman and Wilhelm van der Walt take you flawlessly through three generations of white South African men. Hands-on emotion is hard. It’s embarrassing. Shame-worthy. They’ve been definitively schooled by defining moments of war and loss. Mental illness flows through the family’s blood. Taboo must be kept taboo.
Onstage, it is just Ingrid and her words, her wine, her complex articulation of love and her brutal experience of despair. The letters are unabashed in their eroticism and give-and-take, but Jonker’s aloneness is candidly central. This theatre-making gesture makes you consider the loneliness of being in the world, altogether.
‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ has a strong moral back bone without being clean of fart and snot jokes that are endemic to being a tween, and performed, by a cast which is itself, adolescent, is nothing short of a magical success on the part of its director, Vicky Friedman.
It is a long play, but such is the storytelling acumen and the passionate focus of Mthombeni, that as she begins, you completely lose yourself in its hairpin interstices. You become a molecule in a story which is at once horrifying and messy, tragic and cruel, yet beautiful and mythical.
Taking you unflinchingly to the bedside of his elderly mother, flailing with dementia but sometimes starkly spot on in her lucidity, Peter Godwin’s memoir, ‘Exit Wounds’ laced with alliteration vigorously contemplates the complex texture of the life of a Zimbabwean-born war correspondent, with British ties who currently calls America home.
Myra Egdes’s ‘The Goldfish Bowl and Other Stories’ is a kind of ‘sowing of wild oats’ series of moments for young women, and in being so, it offers a rich slice of life that comments on the world and the implicit sense of protection for young travellers from South Africa.
It is soprano Lise Davidsen in the double-sided role of Fidelio and Leonore, that holds the moment with such acuity, you cannot take your eyes off her. Her presence raises this opera to a paean of hope in the face of injustice, and absolute excellence in the face of mediocrity.
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Chester Miggels
Gillian Rennie
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Geoff Sifrin
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Kapisha Ramraj
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Palesa Moore
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Robyn Sassen
Saleemah Shaik
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