It’s August, women’s month, and one can only hope that the Market Theatre’s current season, consisting of two productions by women directors, is not another instance of tokenism.
To paraphrase a line I saw years ago: tokenism occurs when concessions are made by the powerful to stay in control.
One of the productions, So What’s New? is a superb, timeless play written by decorated writer Fatima Dike, which premiered in 1991 under the direction of the late Barney Simon. The play returns home in the hands of young director Princess Mhlongo at the helm of an amazing cast of four characters: Sibulele Gcilitshana as Thandi; Thuli Thabethe as Patricia; Zimkitha Kumbaca as Mercedes; and Andrea Dondolo as Dee.
It is a showcase of strong women, but we’re not talking stuffy intellectualism here. They may not know or care about who Toni Morrison, Bell Hooks or Gertrude Stein are, but they exhibit strength in using whatever it is they have.
For instance, Patricia puts her good looks and her sexuality to good use and the tough Dee, a shebeen queen, shows business acumen and good sense, which includes trying to keep her daughter from falling pregnant.
Symbolic significance
So What’s New? is, appropriately enough, staged in the Barney Simon theatre and Mhlongo is aware of the symbolic significance of the venue for the production.
She doesn’t appear too worried, however. In her director’s notes, she writes: “Here I am in a theatre named after him [Simon], directing a production loved by many. Talk about pressure. But honestly, I feel blessed to be working with so many passionate people.”
So What’s New? is a rollicking production in which four women are brought together by the accident of birth and chance. The matronly Dee has to raise her daughter in an environment in which you see men (mostly) behaving badly. Mercedes, her bubbly daughter, is both mature and childlike, gliding in a world in which being a woman and a girl is a daily risk.
Danger is not posed by the men who visit her mother’s drinking hole. There’s little risk there because, if you want a knife thrust into your neck, try making a drunken pass at the shebeen queen’s daughter. The risk comes from the snarling drug dealers and the police.
Then there’s Thandi, whose life is plagued by physical problems. Right until the end, it is never clear whether she shakes because she has Parkinson’s disease or arthritis, or whether she is craving a drink.
But the production’s signature performance comes from Thabethe, who plays the township estate agent.
She has it all: voice modulation, a waltzing gait and the diva’s sharp dress sense.
The gravity of existence
It’s the kind of play in which you laugh at 45-second intervals. My friend could barely contain herself. Later, she told me, “I came in expecting to be weighed down by the sheer gravity of black women’s existence in South Africa. But I came out laughing, thinking that it really is a big, fat joke that men still think they call the shots.”
Yet, beyond the laughter one can’t escape the play’s subtle messages or the sense that it is portraying a world askew; a world in which the rat-a-tat sound of the gun rends the quiet night; in which drug dealers run wild; a world in which a strange logic says: “If I don’t sell drugs, someone is going to do it anyway.”
Yet the play tells us that the younger generation is exemplary in refusing to bow to the defeatist logic peddled by the old. And so, the young rebel against the dictatorship of the old, organising against the poisoning of their streets by dealers, suggesting the possibility of a better world.
So What’s New? is on at the Market Theatre until Sunday. It is really good, in many ways rising above the lowly status of “women’s theatre”, an act of tokenism intended to make women look good during “their month”.
Since August is a month of gestures, how about extending the play’s run for a few more weeks so that the tokenists (read men) out there can gain from the story it tells?
So What’s New? is at the Barney Simon Theatre until August 14. Book at Computicket