THEATRE: Guy Willoughby
Put together by its six creators for a frankly polemical purpose, Manje (“Now”) protests the harsh and sordid conditions that women in South African prisons have had to endure.
If that sounds a rather daunting drawcard for an outing to the Civic Theatre, rest assured that this montage of mime, song, dialogue and dance is compelling entertainment. The all-women cast has welded a great deal of harrowing matter into a complex whole, sustained by vibrant performance. The product of detailed on-the-spot research in Johannesburg’s jails, the play was inspired by a local collection of women’s writing called A Snake with Ice Water.
Each of the performers — Nan Hamilton, Nadia Bulbulia, Debbie Bell, Priscilla Xaba, Jenny Chadwich and Megan Pillay — takes a character confined behind bars, and works her experience and history through an overarching debate held with the audience. This interplay between public theme and personal testimony provides the dramatic tension that is pivotal to the production’s success.
Each of the inmates we meet is “inside” for a different reason. Severally and together, they reveal their tangled pasts.
Specific, detailed abuses within the system are dragged into the light — abuses of power by the wardens, who too often take pleasure in humiliating their charges and making the most mundane details of the daily round arduous, if not intolerable. Window-dressing and hypocrisy continue to exist in the Correctional Services, if this production is to be believed.
Overall, then, Manje offers provocative images of a bizarre mode of life, and has power to disturb. However, it’s hard to envisage precisely what action the creators have in mind.
The problem is compounded by some fudged time- lines: occasionally we aren’t clear which era we’re in.
These nagging after-show responses aside, Manje is an attractive, vital piece of theatre that engages six decided young talents. Oh — and any resemblance between this play and Prisoner, the Australian women-in-jail melodrama you can see weekly on TV1, is purely coincidental.
Manje runs at the Pieter Roos Theatre at the Civic until September 24