Chris Dunton
FOUR PLAYS compiled and introduced by Zakes Mda (Vivlia, R49,99)
THE earliest play here is Maishe Maponya’s Umongikazi/The Nurse, dating from 1983. The premire production toured Europe, though deprived of its two leading performers who were refused travel documents “for security reasons”.
That was then – and indeed the play’s subject-matter was itself fiercely topical, “written in the wake of controversy about spending cut-backs and poor facilities at Baragwanath Hospital”. Yet as, towards its end, the play moves into agit-prop and shows nurses organising to demand a better hospital service for the majority, you can see how well a fresh production might work now.
In 1997 an ironic sense of continuity seems to be the order of the day. (Fine if this remains active, doesn’t go senile into cynicism.) It’s there again in the title of Fatima Dike’s play, So What’s New.
This is for four women, who play a Soweto shebeen-queen, her daughter, and two friends, a real-estate saleswoman and a drug-dealer. Central to the stage-set is a TV, and central to programming is The Bold and the Beautiful: the women’s comments on this soap, their attachments to favourite characters, counterpoint the “real” action throughout. Central to reality are the gun battles that break out around the shebeen every other night.
A crucial point for Dike is the survival of the youngest character, the shebeen-owner’s daughter, growing up with women who both shield her with love and concern and draw her close to their own potential for murderous irresponsibility. Her mother worries about who walks her to school; every night men proposition the schoolgirl in her mother’s shebeen.
Yet Dike wishes also to emphasise the courage of these women, their ability to look after themselves, their (relative) independence from their feckless men. Dike’s problematising of these women’s lives and her demonstration of their strengths make for a powerful mix.
A play on women’s experience, and then a play on disaffected youth, Makwedini Mtsaka’s Member of Society probes the creation of the new South Africa. Its twin focal points are the rediscovery of identity amongst a fragmented and traumatised community, and the prevalence of violence. It is dedicated to the actress Kholeka Tile, killed in 1994 by unknown assailants on her way back from the play’s rehearsals.
Finally, Zakes Mda’s own play The Nun’s Romantic Story, set in Lesotho during the 1970 State of Emergency. What Mda attempts here is highly ambitious: to depict the violence inflicted on communities who opposed the ruling party, and yet to foreground the state of transcendental calm achieved by the nun of the title, as she draws on her resources of courage and ironic humour to confront the terror that has destroyed her family.
It is Mda’s success that he avoids making out of all this an embarrassing exercise in rarefication. His nun’s story is (up until a somewhat ethereal ending) utterly persuasive, and one takes that character’s courage and her sense of the transcendent, both on their own terms.
As compiler of the collection, Mda also contributes an introduction, discussing the four plays and giving a concise and perceptive overview history of South African theatre since the 1970s.