There are times in ‘Prima Facie’ when you aren’t sure if it is your own heart-beat you’re aware of, or whether it is the play’s soundscape. Suddenly it is not really Tessa Ensler’s story any more. It’s yours. It’s that of the woman sitting next to you. It’s your sister’s.
Directors Gerard Bester and Sibahle Mangena facilitate the cast of over 30 teenagers, aged between 13 and 19, to voice their opinions about complex social issues the work is tight, it has levity and it will seesaw you through every kind of emotion you have in you. Don’t wear mascara.
This film is the deep primeval howl of a teenaged person who gets herself embroiled in a vortex of bubbles of semi-digested milk, of high school responsibilities, of expenses beyond her vision and of moving into a flat with a boy she is not grown up enough yet to know.
Picture the scenario: A brand new high-end suburban complex with all the checks and balances that define privileged living. Everyone tiptoes around everyone else with a developed sense of conversational hygiene, carefully clicking every ‘c’, ‘x’ and ‘q’, with different parts of tongues not used to doing such things.
The high end musical Pretty Woman never pretends that the arrangement between Vivian and Edward is anything other than what it is. She’s a prostitute; he’s a rich guy. It is a deal, and both of them know it. But knowing something and feeling it are two different things.
It acknowledges and celebrates the flow of gravity and of fabric and the use of the fingers, hair and the expressions of the face in the material. And with all the sturm and drang of excesses and morals, values and torment, the dancers are consistently deliciously light on their feet.
Rather than offering a palatable chronology, Choritz divides her tale into 54 parts, some rooted in whimsy, others in blood. There are parts that are difficult to read because the authorial voice strips herself so naked and says things so raw that you, reading, feel afraid of your own thoughts.
Ultimately, Rise 76 attempts to tell too many stories but invests in none. The second part should have been fermented, sat in, frustrated, dilemma-rised, dismembered, put back together again and then had the chance for its creative team to be left conflicted as to what in the fruits they had.
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.
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