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.
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 Moon Looks Beautiful From Here’ is Aldo Bincat’s beautiful and universal piece, written in simple language with a deft hand and clearly over a great many years of emotions spent and ideas thought and revisited, sometimes in great pain. It’s a touchstone work and a clear victory in storytelling.
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.
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.
This tale is about the women who have awaited their absent men for hundreds of years. It is also about men who go into the world to create lives for themselves, knowing – or maybe forgetting – about the domesticity born of innocent love, that waits for them in a rural place.
In ‘n Begin, written by David Eldridge and translated by Nico Scheepers, the picture of life for both Laura and Daniel is not what either of them were raised to believe it would be. Happily ever after and never again alone are myths they acknowledge, now in their late-30s/early 40s.
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