The world premieres of two new South African plays from black playwright/directors at the National Arts Festival this year contrasted sharply in style and approach. The Market Theatre’s Ten Bush by Mncedisi Shabangu co-written with Craig Higginson explores the tribal past as it takes place in the present, while Martin Koboekae’s Biko: Where the Soul Resides revisits recent history to comment on current politics.
Ten Bush is an actual village in the undeveloped borderland of South Africa with Swaziland and Mozambique. In the play the village is said to be built on the site of a great battle where the Sotho army had once defeated the Swazi chieftainship. A character called Martha is instructed to kill her first-born daughter, as soon as the child reaches womanhood, to lift a malediction on her community.
What follows is a bloody story seething with jealousy, witch burning and cruelty — a world where people are the victims of malevolent superstitions, hostile to the compassionate and governed by malicious supernatural forces. Yet human frailty — jealousy, lust, spite and intrigue — underlies most of the characters’ inhumane acts. The playwrights are careful not to admit any anthropological explanations or simple judgements upon the validity of this world for, strictly speaking, the prophecies are not followed to the letter and this could account for the failure of the believers to redeem their society.
However, the rural pastoral and an Arcadian conviction in the old belief systems is unreservedly exploded. This has long been a theme in black South African theatre: the ordered peaceful world lost to the ravages of modern decadence and urbanisation.
The plight of women in this patriarchal tradition is powerfully foregrounded. The ancestors are male and the women bare the brunt of the cruelties. Barren Martha (played by Tinah Mnumzana) is twisted and embittered from her inability to perform her traditional function of childbearing and to keep her husband, Simon (Sello Sebotsane), sexually interested in her as she ages. Much of the cruelty is perpetrated by the women trapped in this system and they reap the poison they sow. But the evil deeds committed by the men go largely unpunished.
Ten Bush is strenuously developed with physical theatre business, alive with the synecdochical use of props, rich in suggestion and imagery and its story of ancestral imprecations, the supernatural, blindness and human sacrifice has the depth and range of a Greek tragedy. Mncedisi and Higginson draw on the strengths of African legends to produce a human drama of the irrational.
This, with an exceptional cast across the board that includes rising stars Lebogang Modiba and Xolile Gama, with Sebotsane and Mnumzana, makes it a critical success and arguably the strongest drama at this year’s festival.
Biko: Where the Soul Resides is realistic in style and like much of South African theatre relates the action using the staid plodding method of a series of chronologically ordered scenes with blackouts in-between.
Koboekae has come under attack for portraying Steve Biko’s alleged womanising and drinking and the Biko Foundation has refused to support the work. Slightly awkward too is the attempt to portray on stage several of today’s public figures — such as Mamphela Ramphele and Ben Ngubane. Yet Koboekae’s decision not to iconify Biko, to explore the man and the legend, is artistically his most interesting choice. Masoja Msiza commands the stage as Biko and his portrayal is dignified and executed with great poise.
Koboekae invents a discussion between Barney Pityana and Biko, hypothetically discussing the future, to censure the current political dispensation. The criticism is scathing. Biko cannot believe the leadership of the liberation movement will ever abandon its people, but says chillingly that if the country degenerates into nepotism, corruption and factionalism in which the masses are forgotten while the greedy bigwigs struggle for power, “I would rather be dead”.
However, in contrast to its pertinent message, as a theatrical work Biko puts us back 20 years. It is a classic piece of didactic protest theatre, with lengthy political debates and hectoring rhetoric awkwardly wrung from the dialogue and in which the characters are often reduced to the function of megaphones for the author’s message. Some of the dialogue is inventive and snappy and Koboekae has a lively wit, but unfortunately Biko is unlikely to travel well.
Ten Bush plays at the Market Theatre until August 17. Look out for a State Theatre run of Biko: Where the Soul Resides, dates to be released