Very rarely a stark and uncompromising piece of theatre strips away comfort and delusion, inviting the viewer into places of recognition and honesty that are painful but utterly compelling. Skrapnel (‘shrapnel’ in English) is just such a production.
Skrapnel is about a young South African called Chris de Wet who lived in England and was killed in the suicide bombings that took place on the London public transport network on 7 July 2005.
His departure for London was like a small piece of the shrapnel-like migrations of young South Africans in the early twenty-first century, many of whom became caught up in a life of drifting from place to place, constantly moving between various airports, dwellings, workplaces and relationships.
Willem Anker’s superb script uses this setting to explore the psychic and archetypal layers of being that lie below the surface of such an ordinary and yet tragic story of our time and context. It is impossible to do justice to the aching beauty of the poetry of the Afrikaans script in an English-language review.
A South African in London
Chris travels to London in the army boots his father wore in the apartheid army’s war in Angola. He wears a quasi-military shirt and trains as a security guard while in London. His is a struggling sense of manhood that is about toughness, vigilance and survival, yet is also silent and distressed in moments of quiet intimacy.
Jenine Groenewald plays a young South African woman with whom Chris develops a relationship. She wears a stark body suit, with an occasional grey drape, that reveals a body stripped of softness, while her face is streaked with red, a grotesque, often silenced, femininity.
Director Jaco Bouwer’s remarkable design regularly bathes the stage in bland and characterless neon light, illuminating broken pieces of body parts and a circular platform that could be an airport luggage carousel but also suggests a conveyer belt carrying nameless, faceless bodies on journeys away from and into brokenness and loss.
As a character says, when you live in the fluorescent light of an airport where there are no windows, time means nothing and you feel like you can live forever. At other times, though, the actors move in deep shadow as silenced pain and displaced identities are explored.
Identities in construction
A disturbing counterpoint to the lostness of Chris’s generation is provided by a meticulous account of the identities of the suicide bombers who carried out the attack and a scientific account of the way in which such an explosion takes place.
Is identity shaped by the choice or power to carry out violence? What does that mean for those who come afterwards? Are they condemned to carrying on the splintered trajectories of the violence that triggers their being? Are they only fragments of shattered flesh that enter the skin of those they encounter? Is this the legacy of post-apartheid that white South Africans have to make sense of? The most decisive moment in the play is the sound of the bomb exploding. For the rest, we are left to ponder the indisputable significance of Skrapnel as a purveyor of important questions of our time.
This piece is from Cue Online, a project of Rhodes University’s New Media Lab.