THEATRE: David Le Page
‘GOT green chillies, makooooti!” Pertulia Ramaphala’s=20 cry echoes in between sprays of invective directed at=20 the men who harass her character Gladys in the=20 Johannesburg Civic Theatre’s Got Green Chillies Makoti.
Gladys is a vegetable seller with a chequered past that=20 includes a private education interrupted by pregnancy,=20 posing as Winnie Mandela to intimidate householders=20 dreading nationalisation, and outwitting a smooth=20
But though she has steered herself through these=20 colourful adventures and misadventures, managing to=20 support her two children, there is also the sting of=20 tragedy in her story. Gladys is a member of that class=20 it has been fashionable to call the triple oppressed:=20 people who suffer as blacks, as women and as labourers.
Writer/director Vivian Moodley’s choice of Ramaphala=20 for the role of Gladys is canny. No hardened harridan=20 of the streets, she is young and feminine beneath her=20 tough presence and shabby working clothes.=20
A student at the Natal Technikon, Ramaphala is a=20 promising actress, with a voice that adapts itself as=20 well to the rolling exhortations of a charismatic=20 minister as to the drunken singing of a hardened=20 coloured man; in fact here she seems to have an=20 additional organ in her throat that vibrates at will to=20 extraordinary effect.
She is an apt parodist, rippling easily through=20 personas, as comfortable a pugnacious young Zulu bus=20 conductor as she is a Hindu housewife. Which leads us=20 to one of the most interesting aspects of Moodley’s=20 script; Gladys’ experience as a domestic worker is with=20 coloured and Indian employers as well as with whites, a=20 vivid bite of social reality.=20
Moodley’s script is economical, imaginative and very=20 clever, laying us out every so often with sideswipes=20 alternatively delicious and tragic. Some of the=20 incidents are not terribly well-worked out, however;=20 the episode with the pornographer grinds to a bathetic=20 halt. But most of the dramatic snapshots are crisp and=20
Direction is solid, though it lapses seriously in the=20 Winnie Mandela episode, destroying its plausibility.=20 And there are points where Ramaphala rushes through=20 potentially dramatic moments, leaving them gasping and=20
Moodley’s and Ramaphala’s skills coincide most=20 fortuitously in an ingenious and hilarious account of=20 Gladys’ experience of a Hindu “madam” converted=20 overnight to Christianity. Got Green Chillies Makoti is=20 tremendous theatre, and if Moodley can create more of=20 the same, we have much to look forward to.
Got Green Chillies Makoti is at the Pieter Roos Theatre=20 at the Johannesburg Civic. Last shows are this weekend