Written by Mike van Graan, Some Mothers’ Sons is a minimalist two-hander that jumps back and forth between the mid-1980s and present-day South Africa.
Vusi Mataboge (Wiseman Sithole) and Braam Visser’s (Gideon van Eeden) paths crossed in the 1980s while Vusi was in detention and Braam was his lawyer.
The play begins with Braam now in custody and Vusi trying to get him out on bail, a reversal of the circumstances under which they met, a motif that the play uses quite extensively.
The play seems to ask how a man who believed in the sanctity of life and worked at great personal and career risk to preserve life, and was almost a lone voice at his law firm against the injustices that were going on, has been turned into what he fought against.
As the name suggests, the play’s background is peopled by women, be it the nanny, the tea lady, wives and mothers, but we only hear of these women when their lives cross the paths of the men: the sons. Their humanity and their insistent presence is carried by their sons’ anguish and experiences, their trials and tribulations. The production is layered by its sparse props, its transitions between then and now, the use of costumes, and so forth.
Directed by Jay Pather, the play strikes a resonance with the recent debate on crime, but the piece interrogates the state of the nation, how crime has woven itself into the nation’s fabric and how it threatens the very foundations and principles of the new South Africa. The play fleetingly points to how Braam has been turned into an animal, although one does feel that more could have been done to examine the sociology of this problem.
But the play’s strength is its ability to move across different epochs, questioning the values of life, be it on a personal level or in a familial unit.
Some Mothers’ Sons, an expansion of the Dinner Talk trilogy, is an ingenious public vehicle for a public issue that most would rather not talk about in public except, perhaps, at the dinner table.
Some Mothers’ Sons is on show at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, until October 29