The sexually explicit play Cards, about prostitutes, a Nigerian pimp and sex addicts in a Hillbrow brothel opened on May 11 to a restless reception of nervous laughter and bold cheering.
The X-rated and comedic nature of this melodrama with no happy endings marks a small turning point in the way South Africa copes with social decay on the street and in their minds. Laughing at pain has triumphed over dealing with it.
Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom, the play’s author, would agree. ‘I like these stories, not comedy, but dark stories with comic relief,” says Grootboom, the 2005 recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for drama. ‘Dark concepts cover many different issues.”
With each objectification of women in the play’s sex scenes (and there are plenty), the work turns the Market Theatre’s sacred space into more than a theatre — something more complex. The audience is literally forced to see just how far we must go until we gain freedom from our depravity. And if Cards has even 10 % bearing on reality, it is clear we have a long road to walk to real, interpersonal freedom.
However, Cards is a convenient rest stop along the way. It provides a moment to step back and reconsider the role we play in creating environments where prostitution and violence thrive. But this effect only happens in retrospect of course. The shock element in the play is too present to allow audience members to think about their sociological ids.
The constant and disturbing laughter throughout the play from the opening night audience revealed that many actually relate to this extreme reality, embodied in the lives of sex workers and pimps. Unfortunately, South Africa seems to value the quick-and-dirty solutions over slow meditations.
But whether or not audience members use the play as a growing point, if Cards proves to be a commercial success, Jo’burg theatre may never be the same. Indeed, bare-booty shaking and vile language may well become a trend in black theatre still hanging on to the political correctness of the past.
It’s a method that uses dirt to show the dirty truth about rape and sex. Cards is full of it: women abused physically because they refuse to have sex without a condom; poor children resorting to using their bodies in exchange for shelter; jaded hookers on junk; a radical hooker who enjoys her work — the list goes on. With no single message to convey about the lives he portrays, Grootboom succeeds in teaching a lesson about inner-city risk. Ultimately, one has to think more than just, ‘as long as I’m not a prostitute …”
As a playmaker, Grootboom seems to revel in our lack of power to control our lives. His most noteworthy tactic is the play’s analogy to a game of cards, which, by the end, becomes aggressively relevant to anyone needing validation through financial status and love. The play questions whether life is a game of strategy or whether we are merely victims of chance and luck.
Ultimately, Cards works on stereo-types. And it is the stereotype of the destructive outsider, in the form of the Nigerian drug lord and pimp played by Siyabonga Twala, that is most damning. In an attempt to interrogate xenophobia (and, to some degree, sexism) Grootboom actually runs the risk of entrenching it.
Cards runs at the Market Theatre until June 15. Tel (011) 832 1641