I was finally able to watch The Table, a production whose word run I watched earlier this week. The play, a strange melding of magic and history, truth and the meaning of family, opened to a full house at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown on Thursday.
The story travels back and forth between reality and magical realism (not magical realism as it was practised when British authors cottoned on to it, when it became something of a swearword, but magical realism with all its transcendental and transformative powers); the past and the present; an insular idea of the family and family in its most expansive form.
The play was conceived and directed by Sylvaine Strike, its dramaturgy was done by writer Craig Higginson. The Table features Sara (played by Annabel Linder) , a Jewish matriarch born in Poland , her deceased husband, Maurice (played by Brian Webber), her children Daniel and Levi (played by Brian Webber and William Harding) and her daughter Ruth (played by Karin van de Laag). Also sitting around the family table (which is something of an institution) is the family’s domestic worker, Flora, and her daughter, Amo, (played, respectively, by Janet Hampton Carpede and Khabonina Qubeka).
I can’t really reveal what the play is about as the production hinges on an important revelation that is the central cog of the story that propels the narrative.
The story revolves (both literally and metaphorically) around a table. The family is seated around a table for supper on the eve of the unveiling of Maurice’s tombstone. Amo has just returned from the United States of America where she is studying. She comes back into the amourous arms of Levi, the family’s jester, wicked and funny, with a weakness for drink. What is revealed around the table throws light on the family’s history and its present.
The play is based on a true story from the family of the director’s husband. Although largely a gripping story, emotionally tense, I felt there were gaps on its emotional canvas. These moments came especially when it was moving between reality and magic and vice versa, when its energies lay stagnant, as if in a void.
Nonetheless, its a moving (and overt) commentary on the macro family, that is to say the South African nation. The play is saying that the nation needs to tell its most hidden truths (also known as secrets); it’s also suggesting that its notion of family should be broader.
For more from the National Arts Festival, see our special report.
