The theatre crowd at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown is rather demanding, usually reluctant to stand up to applaud actors off the stage. I was, therefore, surprised when more than half of those in the audience stood up to “big up” the actors in Rob Murray’s production called Benchmarks.
It’s not that the play had bad acting, in fact the masked actors in the production (Liezl de Kock , Daniel Robinson and Thumeka Mzaziya) were amazing. It’s the way the theme of xenophobia is tackled — an unsophisticated and paternalistic approach to this scourge.
The fact is xenophobia will continue to afflict us until poor black people learn to live together. A kind white person will help (indeed many white people have reached out to immigrants), but as the black person has to return to the township, the informal settlement, an ending of the play that doesn’t factor in this dynamic will always present problems.
Tension and alienation
The central prop of Benchmarks, a play in which not one word passes through the lips of the masked characters, is a bench, placed right in the middle of the stage. On this bench all kinds of people meet: an aging bureaucrat, tsotsi types and cops. There is a suggestion of danger
and tension, suggested by the distorted soundscapes and creepy figures with black spider tentacles.
The old official from Home Affairs (his mask suggests he is white) wants the bench all to himself. He initially attempts to keep the woman (a black Zimbabwean widow) from the bench, but over time the two realise that they are all humans.
A subplot to this bench drama is an aging woman housed in a small, claustrophobic space, who spends her days soaked in an alcoholic reverie.
There is a lot to like about this play, the superb acting, the masks, created by Cristina Savoldi, that accentuated rather diminished the humanity of the characters; the bizarre, maddening soundscapes conjured by Brydon Bolton and Jacques Toile.
Transformative spectacle
This brings me back to the question I posed at the beginning of this review: why the standing ovation? Perhaps it was because, despite its flaws, Benchmarks is interesting for its innovative approach to issues, its bewitching brew of silence and noise, its portrayal of humanity that shines through the masks and the transformative spectacle of seeing human beings reaching out to their neighbors.
It reminds me of the question: “who is my neighbor?” posed by the law expert when he met Jesus Christ in the gospel of Luke. In attempting to answer the question, Jesus told them of the parable of the Good Samaritan, an eternal tale about human beings recognising that nationality is a rather convenient, political creation; that a different passport, race and sex can never mask the fact that everybody is my neighbor.