Chris Roper On stage in Cape Town
The play Sadako is described as “moving and uplifting” in all the press mentions, and you tend to forget what these clichs really mean until you see them expressed around you. When the lights go up at the end of the play, the man next to me is sniffling unashamedly.
I turn to confide this to my companion, but she’s too weepy to care. And yet people are simultaneously smiling. It’s a reminder of the power of simplicity, and how effective a pared down narrative framework can be when handled by actors and puppeteers sensitised to the nuances of gesture and dialogue that can encapsulate large issues.
Sadako was two years old when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. When she was 11, she was diagnosed as suffering from leukaemia, “the atom bomb disease”.
She was hospitalised, and her best friend told her of the old Japanese legend that anyone who folded a thousand paper cranes would be granted a wish. Hoping that the gods would grant her wish to get well, Sadako started to work on the paper cranes and completed 644 before dying in 1955 at the age of 12.
The remaining 356 were folded by her classmates, and the 1E000 cranes were buried with her. I wouldn’t normally waste a paragraph on retelling the story of a play. After all, that’s the work of the performance, and the task of the reviewer is to briefly catalogue some highlights, provide a way into the play, and comment on salient areas of production.
But it becomes obvious during the course of the performance that Sadako is all about the story. The Hearts and Eyes Theatre Collective and the Puppet People, joint presenters of the play, seem to have striven to keep interpretation to a minimum, allowing the viewer access to an unadorned representation of a series of historical facts.
By unadorned, I refer only to the narrative progression. The puppets and sets are beautiful, and there is a three-tiered perspectival shift which has an extraordinary effect. The characters are presented in three sizes. There’s a small model of the Sasakis’ house, where action takes place in miniature, there are the midsized puppets, and then the puppeteers themselves, who on occasion appear as characters without puppets. The result is that all three representations share characteristics.
The puppets appear more human, and the tiny puppets lend a fabulous air to the larger ones. The actors get to play with mimetic repetitions of the puppets’ gestural range, a device particularly effective given the ritualistic atmosphere that pervades the play.
It’s described as a play for adults and older children, but this is like calling Alice in Wonderland a children’s book. Sadako plays with notions of innocence and childhood, and has that quality that makes all the best children’s literature classic: it treats childhood as an aspect of adulthood.
The image of the atom bomb stands in for the end of childish innocence, and Sadako experiences an accelerated awareness of death.
The company (the play is workshopped) have also taken the brave step of imputing knowledge to children. Director Peter Hayes has a superb touch when it comes to timing and pace. The flow is mesmerising as you shift along a narrative line from atomic explosion to pathetic death, and there is no moment at which you can escape the seductive, almost balletic nature of the performance.
This flow is aided by a constant, yet unobtrusive musical soundtrack, and some nicely judged lighting. The three puppeteer/actors, Cathy Dodders, Jacqueline Dommisse, and Lee-Ann van Rooi, produce impeccable performances, and have accomplished that difficult trick of integrating their corporeality into the souls of their puppets. My only regret is that I didn’t see Sadako at the beginning of its run, so that I could urge everyone to go and see it.
Sadako runs until July 14 at the Baxter Theatre, Rosebank