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.
‘God’s work’ is a film about ghosts and trains and broken promises. Of a brother eternally a child in the initiate’s white clay. Of a drug lord with a machete called Verwoerd, and a vast room of the dead. Of a woman who has waited one year for a train.
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.
LIGHT FROM HAND-HELD torches tears striations in the theatre’s darkness, causing great big unfriendly shadows to loom against the walls as the police take the suspect down. Stage smoke is choreographed to rest and swell with a discomfiting energy as the dealer and his ‘victim’, the ‘cheese boy’ smoke. […]
Occasionally, very occasionally, a creative work seems to make itself. Is it about the universe taking control? Or God? Perhaps it is about having done a thing so often you go into autopilot and don’t think about the hugeness of what you are doing. Either way, when this […]
In 2004, the late historian David Rattray single-handedly performed the tale of the Battle of Isandlwana, the first military encounter in 1879 between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom. The heady mix of energy and fact, sound effects and drama, politics, supposition and legend, drenched as it […]
THE FRISSON OF excitement at the start of a new play is in the air. The audience is exuberant but alert, as soon as the lights drop, silence prevails. And focus. The play begins. He walks on stage. And out of his mouth sprout words I do not understand. […]
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