Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✩✩
written by the Ensemble, directed by Daryl Cloran
Theatrefront, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto
January 28-March 1, 2009
The story of how Theatrefront came to create its latest play Ubuntu is far more interesting than the play itself. The result of four years of collective creation between members of Theatrefront and actors from Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre Centre, Ubuntu is an often dazzling production that surprisingly has nothing whatsoever to say about post-apartheid South Africa.
The title, a word of Bantu origin, is common in the Zulu precept “a person is a person through other people,” meaning that all humanity is a single community. The play seeks to illustrate this concept by creating a plot whose geometrical structure is more important than its logic. A young South African man Jabba (Andile Nebulane) travels to Canada to find his long-lost father Philani (Mbulelo Grootboom) and bring him home. There he meets Michael (David Jansen), who appears in the sole photo Jabba has of his father, but who denies all knowledge of the man. In flashbacks we learn that Philani was, in fact, Michael’s student and fell in love with the shy ornithologist Sarah (Michelle Monteith), whom Michael also knew. Meanwhile, in the present Michael's daughter Libby (Holly Lewis) discovers there was more to her mother’s past than she knew. The plot is artificial because Michael holds the all the answers both Jabba and Libby are seeking, but, for reasons never made clear, pretends he knows nothing, even though he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by being honest. Equally unexplained is Philani’s sudden plunge into depression. The plot’s resolution uses a device that was old even when G. E. Lessing used it in Nathan the Wise (1779).
Nevertheless, the production itself is full of invention and fine performances. Lorenzo Savoini’s set of walls of suitcases proves a treasure trove of hidden entrances and hiding places. All scenes of mime and physical theatre are engaging such as Jabba’s consultation with a witch-doctor spoken all in Xhosa or the marvellously choreographed scene where Jabba enters a bustling university library. The irony is heavy that Michael, the play’s central blocking figure, lectures on how we all came out of Africa and therefore, no matter how diverse, are all ultimately related. Drawing nothing from the richness and dangerous extremes that are South Africa, all the play gives us are platitudes one could learn as easily in Toronto as in Cape Town.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2009-01-29.
Photo: David Jansen, Holly Lewis, Mbulelo Grootboom, Michelle Monteith. ©Michael Cooper.
2009-01-29
Ubuntu (The Cape Town Project)