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.
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. […]
From the outset, before this rollicking monster of a production gets into its stride, the presence of the blood-stained wooden gate, the empty rubber boots and the cawing, mooing, snorting and barking in the sound track, lend Neil Coppen’s Animal Farm its inimitable tone. It’s very dark. It’s […]
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