Ways of Dying, an inventive stage adaptation of Zakes Mda’s novel, opened as part of the Market Theatre’s new season this week. Alex Dodd caught its premiere in Grahamstown
With the kind of trailblazing political history attached to the Market Theatre, expectations were high for associate artistic director Lara Foot Newton’s stage adaptation of Zakes Mda’s novel, Ways of Dying. At the massive 25th anniversary global jamboree fest, this would be the big production from Johannesburg, South Africa’s throbbing creative metropolis. Up close and personal with statements from France, America, Holland and the Czech Republic, what would we have to contribute to the global dialogue about where humanity stands on the brink of the next millenium?
The lefty American next to me is no doubt hoping to deepen his insights into the country with the social policy that competed only with the Holocaust in generating the greatest global outrage of the 20th century. But he is bewildered by the play’s opening, a slight departure from the gritty literalism of Athol Fugard. As the audience clambers on to the stands, the actors wander aimlessly about the stage, which is covered in massive piles of odd shoes.
“All these shoes,” says the mild-mannered American, “What can it mean?” To me the sight is a familiar one: this is the debris and trash that is as common to South African squatter camps as mowed lawns are to Mid-Western suburbs or the bodies/belongings left behind after the police have opened fired on a march. The effect is the first of scenographer Catherine Henegan’s brilliantly inventive visual ploys recreating the messy and jagged urban landscape that counterpoints the pure, uninterrupted space of the rural African vista.
Another one of the play’s most powerful vehicles is also employed at this point. As the cast roams across the valley of shoes, aimlessly filing through indiscriminate loads of junk for clues that will lead them to missing loved ones, they create an aural resonance in the theatre. Their deep, guttural humming is haunting and mournful, setting the tone for a play about the way people live when death is all around them.
Ways of Dying tells the story of a professional mourner, Toloki, who journeys from a rural community to a vibrant but dangerous metropolis in search of his destiny. As it turns out his destiny is deeply entangled in his past and he falls in love with a girl from his village who is the key to lightening the load of the history that oppresses him. Early on in the play the multiple narrators explain their mission and it is a speech with import that stretches way beyond the confines of this theatre, this town, this time.
“It is not different, really, here in the city. Just like back in the village, we live our lives together as one. We know everything about everybody. We even know things that happen when we are not there; things that happen behind people’s closed doors deep in the middle of the night. We are the all-seeing eye of the village gossip. When the storyteller begins `They say it once happened …’, we are the `they’. No individual owns any story. The community is the owner of the story, and it can tell it the way it deems it fit. We would not be needing to justify the communal voice that tells this story if you had not wondered how we became so omniscient in the affairs of Toloki and Noria.”
The play’s structure lives up to this ethos of communal telling, communal creation and ownership of meaning in the most creative of ways. Henegan’s visionary sets and props constitute the physical glue which holds the partialities of the different characters’ tales together. And through the layerings and subjectivities of the many voices that tell the tale, Noria and Toloki’s lives become not just pedestrian, individual histories, but a joint archetype for an ailing society, a vehicle that offers the possibility of redemption for all who dare to love.
Although the play’s defining ethos of communal storytelling has its roots in African oral culture, this is also the modern democratic principle that forges the production’s kinship with groundbreaking contemporary European offerings like Dedale by Philippe Genty. Unexpectedly, Ways of Dying has much in common with Genty’s masterpiece, as well as Theatre Goose on String’s production of Bertold Brecht’s The Wedding. Each of these productions has a post-modern, magic realist take on the world and requires the audience to suspend doubt and believe that, for example, a small wire toy is a minibus taxi or an architect’s model is a real city.
Common to Dedale and Ways of Dying is a continual messing with notions of scale. Little puppets must be understood as having the flesh, blood and humanity of real life characters – for their contribution is as significant to the dramatic denouement as that of the actors themselves. It’s all part of the magic, part of the grand theatrical illusion. Grand is perhaps the wrong word, because this illusion is built on such rudimentary materials. Economic bits and pieces constitute the make-believe of a people’s theatre describing a world of poverty and desperation where magic miraculously manages to endure. Echoes of the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, the fantastical edge injected into the socialist vision of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
Ways of Dying shares with the Eastern European production (The Wedding) a crudeness and roughness that is the product of a society ravaged by war, poverty and social upheaval. That’s not to say the two productions don’t have their funny moments, but it’s rough, wordly-wise kind of humour unafraid of offending delicate sensibilities. When the beautiful, sad heroine is described repeatedly as “that stuck-up bitch” you realise that sweet little romantic niceties are the bourgeois preserve of Kate Winslett in Titanic. This is hard-hitting theatre that holds no punches and tells no lies.
The acting is impassioned and consummate from beginning to end. Nomsa Nene is quite mystifyingly characterful, especially as Noria’s belligerent, ailing mother demanding cigarettes as she dies of lung cancer. The play teems with brutal realities. Far from an easy watch, it is upsetting and gruelling, transporting the audience to a world where violence is easier to come by than food and morality is a distant cousin twice removed.
I would argue that the production could do with a serious cut. There needn’t be those moments of seeming relentlessness. However, despite a difficult patch about two-thirds of the way through, when the whole narrative seems to momentarily lose momentum, structurally the play is complex and arresting.
In the beginning I felt terribly, irredeemably white – quite alienated from the social idiosyncracies and perhaps even the everyday cultural assumptions that abound throughout the establishment of the plot. My distance from the world described in the play was an awkward reality that made laughter edgy. My class and place in society, as someone who could afford to be watching this play at the Grahamstown festival, was an unsettling reality in the face of all this desperation and poverty.
But as the plot developed and the characters got under my skin and into my psyche, that reality receded and was replaced by a burning sympatico with the characters’ destinies. By the end, the awkwardness of difference had been burned away by the play’s powerful affirmation of the commonality of human experience and the universal healing power of love.