On the final night of the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, the Long Table late-night restaurant again proved to be the great leveller, as much for the migraine-inducing boxed wine as the opportunity it allowed audiences to sidle up the trestle tables to performers they’d recently seen or heard.
Within the medieval din of eating, drinking, posing and revelry were some of the cast of Wit — one of the stand-out theatre pieces of the festival.
Neil Coppen (Dr Jason Posner) was discussing his performance as a callous medical fellow with two doctors from Pietermaritzburg — the anaesthetist across the table was indignant about the character he felt made generalised attacks on the health profession.
Hunched nearby sat Claire Mortimer, who played the main protagonist, Dr Vivian Bearing, a cancer-stricken professor of 17th-century English poetry. She seemed worn out and, in the candlelight, in character: a lonely woman in a body bludgeoned by experimental chemotherapy after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
The 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatic play Wit, written by Margaret Edson and performed by Durban-based theatre company KickstArt, evoked much reaction: visceral, intellectual and even physical.
And it’s having the same effect at Durban’s Playhouse Loft theatre.
Mortimer has drawn unanimous praise for her depiction of the dry-humoured Bearing, a specialist in the metaphysical poet John Donne’s Holy Sonnets — referenced often in an exquisitely multilayered script previously described in one New York Times review as “finding poetry in the reading of a sonogram and science in the deconstruction of a sonnet”.
Greg King’s immaculate set design allows seamless movement between the present Bearing in a medical research hospital and scenes from her past: both in childhood and at university where she appears consistently cold to her students, as her doctor, Posner, is to her now.
People have left the theatre in tears. Others are angered by a perceived criticism of the medical profession. All are moved in some way.
At a festival seminar to discuss Wit, Edson said she wrote the play because she wanted to “portray kindness” and likened it to an imagined “tombstone where the message is ‘Love one and other'”.
That the message plays out in sterile oncology wards where clinical academia converges with scientific research makes the general need for kindness all the more acute.
Edson, a preschool teacher in the United States, wrote the play in 1991 after working as a clerk at a medical research hospital and “observing” the patients and doctors.
Mortimer, who says she is “no method actor, but I need an arsenal of information for a role, otherwise I feel stupid”, researched the disease, drugs and spent time talking to both her GP and patients at a local oncology unit. She says she was “humbled” by the experience of talking to cancer survivors, but felt “fake” because she was researching a character who eventually dies — something she couldn’t bring herself to tell people so open in sharing their experiences.
Like Donne’s poetry, Wit leaves the audience and its actors with questions to grapple with.
Mortimer, who describes her character as someone who “had no siblings, no lovers and was truly a singular person — unable to connect simple human truths with scholarly standards”, is attempting to fathom what would drive a woman who realised she was going to die to volunteer as a “guinea pig” for such dehumanising treatment.
Mortimer says of the character’s options: she could have harboured hope of survival or merely recognised the treatment’s potential for extending medical knowledge. This would have appealed to her academic ego. But there are no conclusions.
Having experienced the wretchedness of chemotherapy, this writer echoes her questions. Chemo insists you replot your personal breaking point, something I found possible only because of the love of family and friends around me. Bearing had none of that.
Nearing the end, there is the simple kindness of a nurse, Susie (Olivia Borgen) — but was that enough to redeem Bearing’s lifetime spent distancing herself from other human beings?
There is the suggestion that little details do matter: at one point Bearing remembers an academic quibble over the use of a comma, rather than a semicolon, in a reading of Donne, noting: “Nothing but a comma separates life, and life ever-after — the insuperable barrier between one thing and the next is just a comma”.
Wit runs at Durban’s Playhouse Loft Theatre on July 24 at 8pm, July 25 at 3pm and 8pm and July 26 at 6pm. It is also scheduled for the Hilton Festival in September and for Johannesburg before the end of the year