SUM OF THE PARTS: While there is a grand narrative, it 's the small details that Lara Foot includes which will haunt you. Each image is left to drift in your imagination. Picture: RUPHIN COUDYZER SUM OF THE PARTS: While there is a grand narrative, it 's the small details that Lara Foot includes which will haunt you. Each image is left to drift in your imagination. Picture: RUPHIN COUDYZER
IT’S been 10 years since I staggered out of the first performance of Karoo Moose and a decade later it packs an even harder punch. The increased intensity is a product of the growth of the cast and the heightened urgency of the themes addressed in the play – the plight of a generation of lost innocence and the cost of a nation with no fathers. Karoo Moose was performed as one of Foot’s retrospective works at the National Arts Festival where she was the featured artist this year.
The play has come full circle since it was commissioned by ABSA bank and first performed at the Aardklop Festival in 2007. The story of the forays of a strange European beast who escapes en route to its destination foregrounds the plot. It is a catalyst for the events that ensue and becomes an unwitting vehicle of retribution. With the allegorical sensibility of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the magical dreaminess of Gabriel García Márquez this is storytelling which draws you in to its very core and never truly lets you go. The text is spellbinding and there are moments when you want to pause to allow the words to settle or ask for them to be repeated.
Foot’s directorial signature is evident but it is the cast that take this particular production to heights that even she herself could not have imagined. In the intervening years they have performed on stages here and internationally and their experience and maturity has added a poignancy and depth to their performances.
The tale is set in Noxton, a rural village “down here somewhere in the Eastern Cape,” a place “where nobody ever goes and few people ever leave.” It is typical of many places in South Africa, ravaged by poverty and blighted by apartheid. Here we find Thozama, the young girl at the centre of the story. The role is carried with an almost unbearable intensity by Sopotela. She is always a delight to watch on stage but she surpasses even her own high standard in this role. She is the only member of the cast who focuses solely on one role as the others morph into various, even contradictory characters. Her transformation is of another kind.
From a playful young girl to a fierce mother, her journey is the longest. Her loss of innocence in the ultimate betrayal of kinship and blood is shameful. During the play she is the victim in a disturbing scene of brutality. Without any physical contact whatsoever between the actors we are drawn in to her pain and called to bear witness. She runs the gamut of every possible human emotion and we feel each one of them intensely with her.
The experience of the intervening years is most keenly sensed in Mbongo’s performance. In addition to honing his theatrical skills he is also the Theatrical Director of the Zabalaza Festival. His portrayal of Kola is vicious and dark and the casual brutality of toxic masculinity is all-consuming.
Minutes later he is a white Afrikaans mother, and in between a mischievous child. He slips easily between each role with a sleight of wardrobe, a facial contortion or two and a perfectly pitched vocal modulation. Vying for the most despicable role in the play is Jonas (Tshazibane), Thozama’s father a gambler, a drunkard and a lout. Equally adept at transformation he will enrage you and evoke a complex response of pity and disgust. Helesi is remarkable and bears a lifetime of sorrow as the grandmother with the fortitude her name, Grace implies. Her relationship with her employer Mrs van Wyk is steeped in the silence of a shared pain that she “tries to forget.”
She rages against her son and his unforgivable behaviour and tries to anchor the family with her faith.
Kweyama who breathes life in to the moose, bearing palm frond horns and has choreographed the piece ensures the physicality is woven seamlessly in to the story.
Since the production premièred he has attained his MA in which he interrogated dance and movement as methods of making meaning for both the actors and the audience, something which he does with immense success here. The battle sequence is mesmerizing and much of the movement has a dreamlike quality eliciting a somatic response. Mantsai is a white policeman, Brian van Wyk, himself the son of an absent and despicable father and no stranger to tragedy.
In addition to playing the role of the teacher his musical direction harnesses the voices of the cast and the primal rhythm of drums to create a haunting sound scape.
Each individual performance is superb, but there is something in the sum of the parts of this particular cast that results in a soul stirring experience.
As is custom in traditional storytelling one senses that a spirit is welcomed in to the space and there is a palpable sense of magic which the cast’s combined efforts create which feels almost otherworldly.
While there is a grand narrative it is the small details that Foot includes which will haunt you, the glorious sight of Thozama rowing across the river in a re-purposed car bonnet like some African River Queen, the repeated discovery of a roll of humbugs, the sunflower faces and crisp packet dresses of the children. Each image is created with precision and left to drift in your imagination.
A small kitchen is transformed in to a dining room by merely flipping a box. The set that circles the stage demarcates the site of the story as a sacred space, a ritualistic place of story telling. While the story is at times horrific and dark it is infused with a with that will have you laughing through your tears.
Time has given the story another layer of meaning. As “the story reflects upon itself, ashamed that it chose this particular course. It is stagnant, paralysed and like a sick animal it rests to lick its wounds, quietly contemplating possible outcomes,” I couldn’t help but ponder that as a country we are perhaps at that same moment and require some time to “lick our wounds.” It is the children and the relentless hope of youth that are the ultimate purveyors of some semblance of a future, “a better place” for the inhabitants of Noxton. Perhaps that is where the hope lies for us all and it is they who must slay the beast and “desperate for new beginning , plot a new story.”
I have had the good fortune of watching a great deal of theatre and Karoo Moose has occupied a space in my memory and being in a way that few other performances have. The physicality of the piece, the rich text, the haunting sounds and the dreamlike movement evoke a deeply visceral response and etch it firmly in one’s corporeal memory. I have like many other audience members been permanently marked by its anguish, courage and searing truth. I trust you will too.
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