“WHY should I care about a white woman?” asks Solomon Xaba (Mbulelo Grootboom), a young black man. He answers his own question later in the play: “She runs through me”. The “she” he’s referring to is Marion Banning (Aletta Bezuidenhout), an older, white woman.
Marion is still in grief for her son. He was hijacked and killed. The details in the reporting are upsettingly familiar. We gather that a media circus followed; she had a nervous breakdown, underwent shock therapy, and seven years later has not regained her will to live. It has ended her marriage, and her remaining family have emigrated. The murderers have never been brought to justice due to police incompetence and an intimidated local community.
The mystery which slowly unfolds is why Solomon has come, and why has he watched her secretly for months. When he finally enters her home, she says she hopes he has come to kill her and save her the trouble. She is suspicious. Her house is earmarked for land distribution and the community want her removed. We know from what he has said that someone has sent him.
The dilemma of their relationship is summed up in a brief interchange around the word “boy”. Solomon receives it as racist paternalism. She says it as a “caring word”, a word she’d use for her son, “my boy”. He concedes his late grandmother used it as an affectionate term for him.
Bezuidenhout slowly brings the despondent Marion to life, plotting the trajectory along which her character is reanimated with precision and nuance. From the outset, we know there is life and humour within her, playwright Lara Foot Newton giving Marion delightfully eccentric opinions.
Grootboom has in the last few years blossomed as an actor and his performance of Solomon is confident and natural.
Birrie le Roux’s set is exquisite. The scrim walls are at once constructed and organic. Fronds grow up the faded mauve walls and rose petals strew the floor. Marion’s roots are inextricably bound to this land; her son is buried in its soil.
This is an unpretentious, affirming work and a story beautifully told. It will work well on radio, probably better. It is more of a duologue than a straight play. Solomon has several soliloquies and Marion speaks to us through a family letter she composes. The characters spend more time directly addressing the audience than one another.
Foot Newton skilfully charts the subtle negotiation between these two individuals as they reach towards each another. As Linda Biehl said of the two perpetrators who killed her daughter Amy in an act of political violence in 1993: “I’ve grown fond of these boys. I enjoy them. They’re like my own kids. It may sound strange, but I tend to think there’s a little bit of Amy’s spirit in them.”
