Photo: Christine Gouws
Young playwright Nicholas Spagnoletti has made a notable debut with London Road, his first fully produced play (and a nice coup too to have Lara Bye direct).
As someone who lived for a while in the actual London Road in Sea Point, and watched it almost disintegrate in the 1990s and then regenerate, I can vouch for the veracity of the work. The text is a pleasant mix of inventive comedy and tragedy, familiar and resonant for many local theatre patrons.
In a series of short vignettes (the entire duration is just under 60 minutes), it charts the friendship to fruition of two unlikely soul mates brought together by their determination to triumph over circumstance: Rosa (Robyn Scott), a young, illegal immigrant and drug peddler, and Stella (Ntombi Makhutshi), a lonely, elderly Jewish widow whose family has emigrated.
Although Makhutshi gives a fine, nuanced, and well-judged performance, Scott tends to dominate, mostly because the script is unbalanced; Rosa is far more realised as a role. Scott is as always reliably comic (Rosa would fit in perfectly as one of NBC TV’s The Golden Girls), yet touchingly vulnerable as the frailties of age overtake her character. The characters themselves are fresh; the scenario novel yet quite plausible; and Spagnoletti has both a good ear for dialogue and a camp sense of humour.
Overall, it is one of the better straight play texts (in the sense that it is a dramatic dialogue for actors) seen in a while in Cape Town. This is indeed promising new work.
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Photo: Jaco Marais
In our post-apartheid state, racial tension in the Western Cape between black and coloured South Africans is an explosive issue with a long and painful history. It remains a taboo subject, which is why New York based playwright Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman has resonated strongly with local audiences.
Set in South Carolina in the 1970s, this coming of age romance between childhood sweethearts – buxom, dark-skinned, dirt-poor Alma and lighter-skinned, better-off ‘yellaman’ Eugene – relates their personal struggles to overcome their private demons and to nurture their love in the face of a divided, hate-filled community as prejudiced around color issues as the greater American society.
A relentless indictment of the community it depicts, riven by internalised racism, there is little sympathy for Alma’s pauperised, alcoholic and self-loathing mother or Eugene’s vindictive, emotionally violent and physically abusive father. They are presented as the inexorable consequence of their dehumanising circumstances. With disappointing predictability, shortly after Alma and Eugene consummate their love (in what would have been a better, affirming and as powerful ending) their future is blighted by melodrama, with Eugene succumbing to the inescapable fate of most black protagonist in mainstream narratives – uncontrollable violence followed by a lengthy prison term.
Mwenya Kabwe’s (Alba) is sensational; it is hard to take one’s eyes off her. David Johnson (Eugene) is laudable, though less successful with the Geechee accent which seems to restrict his emotional range. Together they play all the other characters in what are really two parallel monologues.
Orlandersmith is foremost a performance poet and a proponent of story-telling theatre. The writing is evocative, the characters vivid, the story compelling and although issue driven, she avoids the usual pedantic pitfalls.
But I confess I am not a fan of narrative theatre (an audio book does me just fine). Even during the few times Eugene and Alma do interact on stage they narrate the action and what they feel. There is much repetition and a straight two hours of parallel monologues is long for this format. Director Lara Bye had sensibly cut about 20 minutes, but the playwright attending the opening night reversed this sensible decision. Hopefully Bye will be given a freehand to exercise some judicious cuts. The audience will agree.
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