A Coloured Place Laager Theatre, Market Theatre complex Until January 29 The death of a grandmother provides an opportunity for two coloured women (Esmeralda Bihl and Crystal Tryon) to take stock of the past and present. From a life stowed away in a dark wooden trunk that once stood at the foot of a mother’s bed, the two haul out relics of the coloured past. Auntie’s gaudy Seventies platform shoes and an old jewellery box sit alongside remnants of an old trousseau. This is a Pandora’s box of family secrets about a history that everyone well, everyone South African, that is already knows. Apartheid was a time when little girls, and big ones, worried about the kinkiness of their hair. The first third of Malika Lueen Ndlovu’s A Coloured Place is devoted to the hair issue: mothers working themselves to death with hot tongs to get the African-looking sibling to resemble the Asian-looking one. It’s not a new story, from whichever angle one views it. Every time one encounters a play that dwells to any degree on the politics of race the old hair drama resurfaces. At a guess one can conclude that everyone is tiring of it: theatre-attending blacks and non-blacks alike. Which doesn’t mean that the issue of the straightness of hair has never been an issue at all. It’s the same with domestic violence. In one scene of the play, structured in non-sequential events characteristic of coloured life, Bihl plays a law student who arrives home from socialising to find her mother badly beaten up by her father, sitting alone in the dark. The floodgates are opened for all the melodrama of kitchen-sink-type theatre to wash in. It’s quite electrifying to be in the auditorium to see how members of the audience weep along.
A Coloured Place is not an entirely optimistic piece of work. It’s about the dreams and ambitions that coloured women have and don’t always realise. But it falls short of breaking entirely with the stereotypes we’ve come to accept about the “coloured place”. Innovative director Tina Johnson, who worked with Rajesh Gopie on the hit Out of Bounds, continues with her interest in broader community life. The only difference here is that she is not that well served by Ndlovu’s rather predictable script. It is redeemed by some fine performances, though. Matthew Krouse