Windybrow Theatre’s Last Pro in Yeoville promises so much and yet delivers so little.
The play, written by Martin Koboekae, is set in a Yeoville flat overlooking a street frequented by pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers, in other words, people who live outside the strictures of mainstream “morality”.
The stage is tastefully decorated with artistic props: the lounge area has a trumpet, books, paint, brushes and a canvas; the bedroom has a bed and bookshelf. The production features Billy (Seputla Sepogodi), Poiho (Lunga John Radebe) and Camellia (Onida Cowan). Billy, formerly a writer, is now a painter; he shares his flat with Poiho, a trumpeter.
One night as the two housemates stand by the balcony looking down on the menacing streets below — Billy sipping his whisky and Poiho smoking a joint — they see a white prostitute on the prowl.
That provides an opening for them to talk about the attraction of the white woman to the black man. It’s the usual stuff, you know, nothing particularly penetrating, about how the black man fantasises about the white woman.
Never getting past first gear
As Billy has been commissioned to do a nude portrait of a white woman, he immediately sees a professional need for Camellia. He invites her to pose, for a fee, of course. Although the play promises to titillate and tantalise because of its themes and props (interracial relationships, prostitute a trumpet, a writer and writing, a painter, a bed etc), it really fails to take off. As I sat there watching, I remembered the man in the saying with the Ferrari that he only drives in first gear.
The play’s dialogue is luxuriant when sometimes it needed to be restrained, the acting rather flaccid when it needed to be punchier and the movement rather too rehearsed when at times it had to be spontaneous. Poiho’s playing never really moves beyond the first note, and after a while the bombast in Billy’s language becomes tiring (perhaps it was deliberate). The play’s redemption is Camellia, whose sad story infuses the production with history, feeling and raw emotion.
Despite all these flaws, the play is worth checking out because of what it’s saying about the offspring of interracial relationships. If you want to know a truth about a nation, look closely at how it treats its “bastards”.
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