Alex Dodd
Imagine spending 25 846 hours in a prison cell anticipating a noose tightening quickly and irrevocably around your neck – punishment for a crime you did not commit. This is the nightmare that came true for Duma Khumalo, who spent seven years in prison – three of those on death row for the necklacing of Khuzwayo Dlamini, deputy mayor of the Vaal Triangle. He was reprieved the day before he was about to hang – granted a stay of execution.
Khumalo is one of the people who confronts audiences with his real-life story in the personal South African drama The Story I Am About to Tell. One of the more challenging plays to hit Grahamstown this year, the production has already played to acclaim locally and in Munich, Stockholm and the Netherlands. Taking on the contentious issue of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the play avoids the hollow rhetoric of politics and goes straight to the gut with real human beings telling their life stories from the fictionalised context of a taxi journey.
The production first came into being when Bobby Rodwell took up her two month residency project at the Market Theatre Laboratory. These residencies were set up by the late Barney Simon and were intended to give artists free rein to truly experiment. Rodwell began working with Khumalo, Catherine Mlangeni – the mother of Bheki Mlangeni, who was blown up by the security police – and Thandi Shezi, who was tortured and raped in detention. All three of them were members of the Khulumani Survivors Support Group. Mlangeni and Duma had already told their stories at the truth commission and Shezi subsequently told hers at the women’s hearings.
It was the emotional power of these three life stories that propelled the project forward, and director Robert Colman was approached to shape the material into a play. The idea of the taxi as a meeting place was inspired by the truth commission slogan “Journey to peace”. Ramalao Makhene was brought in to play the taxi driver, or more philosophically the part of “the reasonable man”. Kenneth Nkosi plays the cynical young wisecracker who is opposed to reconciliation and the whole truth commission process. Dan Robbertse, the only white character in the taxi, is triggered into telling of his experiences as a white conscript. Not exactly light entertainment, but certainly powerful theatre.
When the drama is over, the audience is invited to ask questions. At one Munich performance a white woman wandered on to the stage and said she’d been married to a black South African who had vanished. This was the first time she had been able to reconcile herself with her past. “People get really emotional. Sometimes there are angry responses,” says Colman, “but generally there’s a sense of real catharsis.”
In Germany the stage manager was blown away, he says: “Her parents were Nazis, and she said … in Germany … after the Holocaust there were the Nuremberg trials for the bigwigs and that was that. For the person in the street all that history was squashed. The truth commisison may have its faults, but its power lies in the healing process, which seems right compared to putting a lid on things.
“Somewhere beyond the whole pro- and anti- truth commission debate we wanted to find a way to give dignity and weight to the people who told their stories and wanted to go through the process.”
Colman says the play has triggered the question, is this theatre? He sees it as developmental theatre, stressing the aspect of psychological development that has become latent in the term.
The Story I Am About to Tell can be dressed up or down as a production. It can play as easily in the Stadstheater in Stockholm as it can in an old school hall in Mpumalanga. “Most of my recent work has to be simple enough to hold wherever it plays,” says Colman. “You need to be able to turn six grey plastic chairs into a taxi.”
This is an increasing trend in South Africa,with groups like the Sibikwa Players, Brett Bailey and the Third World Bunfight company, and actress Amanda Lane taking a gung-ho approach to the bums-on- seats problem.
Colman and Bailey also share a passion for working with non-actors. “Anyone who wants to, can act,” says Colman. “And acting can have a powerful impact on their lives.”
Before Grahamstown, The Story I Am About to Tell will be performed at the London International Festival of Theatre with William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company’s Ubu and the Truth Commission. Ubu’s theatricalised format complements the rawer Brechtian The Story I Am About to Tell. If you’re up to the honesty, don’t miss it at this year’s festival.