Monde Mayephu is not very articulate, but why should he be? After all, he is in the process of setting himself up as a playwright and not a public speaker. And anyway, his work The Pen — now showing at the African Bank Market Theatre — needs no explanation.It’s not a new story — one guy caught between two girls. Or, seen from another angle, two girls having to deal with one guy’s confusion. While the male perspective is important to the work, it is perhaps Mayephu’s personal circumstances, and how they inform the work, that make The Pen most intriguing.Mayephu lives in Diepkloof with his parents — the fate of many unemployed or semi-employed aspirant township professionals. He has, however, set his play in Yeoville and made his lead character, Sipho (James Ngcobo), an up-and-coming playwright like himself.’The artist who lives in Diepkloof, you find mostly living under his parents’ roof — staying at home. But the artists you find living in Yeoville, they are independent. That’s why I decided the play should be set in Yeoville,” Mayephu says. Then he adds a final but relevant fact: ‘But for Sipho, especially, it’s not his place. It’s his girlfriend’s place.”A decade ago, even city audiences may not have comprehended the intricacies of Mayephu’s plot. These days, when ‘Jim comes to Joburg” he doesn’t book in on the mines anymore. Instead we have a fictionalised black playwright, on the brink of success, living the bohemian life in a historically white area. His girlfriend Pinky (Mmabatho Mogomotsi) comes from Durban. Pinky is a singer-dancer who, in Mayephu’s mind, stayed in Johannesburg after appearing here in an African dance spectacular — like, say, Sarafina or African Footprint.’Most, you know, when they start making it in the field they want independence from home. Then they relocate from the township and they go to the cities. I don’t know about other races, but in most cases black parents don’t understand when you say I am an artist,” Mayephu moans. One senses the personal turmoil he has invested in the work.Ngcobo’s playing of the Yeoville-based playwright Sipho is self-conscious, intellectual and intense. His sensitivity seems constructed to mask his major personality flaw. He is not entirely in love with Pinky, but with a figment of his memory: his ex-girlfriend Thandi (Lindiwe Chibi), about whom he is writing his new play.It is this love triangle, and the magical realism constructed by director Fiona Ramsay, that make The Pen such a fascinating journey. Gone is the forceful rhetoric of agitprop. Gone is what Mayephu refers to as ‘the campaign”.’When they don’t campaign,” Mayephu says, ‘plays bring some change as well, somehow. Because I think people write for different reasons. Some write because they want to make people aware. Some write plays because you find there’s somebody who’s having the same problem that the play is trying to put out. So the play says, ‘You’re not alone with your problem.’”At the other end of town, at the Tesson Theatre in Braamfontein, an entirely different work, emanating from Europe, articulates the same themes as The Pen. Is it merely by coincidence, one asks, that two plays currently running in Johannesburg tell of infidelity in relationships without a mention of HIV/Aids? Or could it be that practitioners have tired of a message-laden theatre with heavy-handed depictions of violence — domestic or otherwise?The Pen and the Civic Theatre’s production of Debbie Isitt’s The Woman Who Cooked Her Husband are both fanciful looks at the dark subject of dishonesty. But does director Alan Swerdlow’s stylish production of Isitt’s play, with its comedic depiction of domestic violence, make light of something grave?’Not at all,” says Swerdlow. ‘It gives lots of space to the seriousness, but at the same time it treats it with a certain amount of humour. It’s dark humour. It is sometimes an uncomfortable piece in terms of the fact that it hits home. Part of it — I’ve been told, but I don’t want to go into it further — has to do with Debbie Isitt’s parents’ breakup. I think there is some drawing on autobiographical memory, shall we say. There are different ways of treating different topics, and some of them make the point more skilfully with comedy.”At a certain point in The Woman Who Cooked Her Husband, the ditched, now-neurotic wife Hilary (Sandra Prinsloo), knife in hand, confronts the cheating Kenneth (Martin le Maitre) and a brawl ensues.’I think it’s played for the comedy of the moment,” Swerdlow observes. ‘Certainly, I think it’s played for the anguish of the moment. In the play, Hilary says at the end, very strongly, ‘He never laid a finger on me. I’ve heard about husbands who beat up their wives, child-batterers, child-molesters.’ She goes through that litany and she says he wasn’t one of them, but she implies that the kind of violence to her person was far more a mental cruelty.”Reflecting on the fact that Mayephu’s work and his own current production have similarities beyond their cultural specificity, Swerdlow says: ‘We’re only starting to build a core of writers and playwrights in this country who are prepared to move out of the improvised, workshopped type of production, who are writing dialogue and, in a sense, are writing about ordinary domestic issues.’I’m saying give audiences a bit of everything.”
The Pen runs at the African Bank Market Theatre until March 9. The Woman Who Cooked Her Husband runs at the Tesson Theatre until March 23. Book at Computicket