Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
✭✭✭✭✩
by Athol Fugard, directed by James Ngcobo
Market Theatre (Johannesburg), Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto
April 8-12, 2015
Johnny: “I can wash my hands, but I can’t wash my mind”
As part of its Spotlight on South Africa, Canadian Stage is presenting a production of an early play by Athol Fugard by Johannesburg’s renowned Market Theatre. That alone would be reason enough for a lover of theatre to rush down to the Berkeley Street Theatre this week to see Nongogo during its short run. Beyond this general reason, there is a more specific one – it is a fascinating play impeccably performed. In Canada we know Fugard from such breakthrough plays as Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972) and The Island (1972) or such later plays as “Master Harold”...and the Boys (1982) or The Road to Mecca (1984). Nongogo from 1959 is exciting because it was written for a local rather than international audience and because it shows such piercing insight so early into the complex of problems that white exploitation of South Africa had caused and would continue to cause.
The play is about how the past prevents people realizing dreams for a better future. The two central figures Queeny (Masasa Mbangeni) and Johnny (Nat Ramabulana) are both trying to escape a past they try to keep secret. Johnny eventually tells Queeny his secret, but Queeny hesitates to reveal hers until near the end of the play. The play’s title, however, already tells us what it is. Queeny was a “nongogo” (pronounced “nóng-go-go”), the Zulu word for a half-crown, meaning that she was a prostitute who would have sex for that price. Queeny, thus, had no secret from the original audience who would know what she had been and how she has changed.
When the action begins, Queeny has earned enough money that she has fulfilled what she thought was he dream of running her own “shebeen” or drinking establishment. Now, five years later, she is unsatisfied. She feels she is simply catering to men’s vice as she had before. Her good friend Sam (Pakamisa Zwedala), likely her former pimp, is now her liquor supplier and is happy with their arrangement although he thinks Queeny should start diluting her liquor the way other shebeen owners are doing. This is contrary to Queeny’s aspirations of trying to live her life with some with authenticity. In her words she wants to be a “woman”, not what she once was, and she wants to live honestly. Sam, however, never hesitates to remind her of what she used to be and claims not to see that she has changed or can change.
Into this atmosphere steps a polite, good-looking man who at first gives Queeny a fright because she can’t see what a man who doesn’t want a drink would stop her place. This is Johnny, a young man who is trying to get a new start in life by being his own boss. His business, however, of selling tablecloths door to door, hasn’t turned out so well. Queeny’s fear quickly turns to interest since Johnny’s desire for freedom, for a break from the past and servitude to no one, so closely accords with her own. Queeny may run her own shebeen but Sam is still keen to make her feel beholden to him.
Johnny trusts Queeny enough that he tells her of his larger goal of becoming an interior decorator and is so persuasive that Queeny loans him £10 to start. This deal causes Sam to fear that Queeny will slip from his hands and causes Blackie (Desmond Dube), a deformed odd-job man, to fear she will no longer protect him. The two conspire to break up the budding business, and seemingly romantic, partnership that has developed between Queeny and Johnny.
Superficially, Fugard seems to be writing in the melodramatic mode of Tennessee Williams, though without the purple prose, in showing us a woman, as in Orpheus Descending (1957) trying to escape a bad man to find freedom with a stranger. The key difference is that Johnny is no charismatic drifter but an ordinary good man who suffered sexual abuse as a boy and is valiantly trying to make a new start despite the imprint it has left on him. What we and Queeny don’t fully realize until the end is that just as Queeny thinks she has found her salvation in Johnny, so he thinks he has found it in her.
Unlike Williams, who ties the characters in Orpheus Descending to classical mythology, Fugard links his to economics and politics. For both Queeny and Johnny the past is marked by sexual degradation. Johnny was abused as a boy working with adult male miners. As a “nongogo” Queeny’s main trade was those same men. Just as Queeny and Johnny were exploited by the miners, the miners themselves were exploited by the foreign companies that hired them to exploit South Africa’s natural wealth.
Fugard’s style of writing is also completely different from Williams’. Symbols do not come from outside the story but grow up naturally from ordinary objects within it. A simple red tablecloth, yellow curtains and a colourful swatch book take on greater meanings as the play progresses. Director James Ngcobo and designer Nadya Cohen are well aware of this, making these three items stand out against the drabness that characterizes the rest of the shebeen. The only source of frustration is that characters at the height of emotion will switch from English into Zulu for which there are no surtitles.
Ngcobo’s direction follows Fugard’s inspiration by Bertolt Brecht in presenting the play non-naturalistically. Furniture and a few props are placed in the otherwise bare interior of the Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs. Players exit a scene but not the stage where they take a seat in view of the audience while the action continues. While the furniture and props may be realistic, right down to a cooking pot of chicken soup whose aroma wafts through the theatre, the shebeen itself and its township location is represented by a mashup of doors, window frames and fences hung over the cooking area. When Queeny buys yellow curtains, an oversized yellow banner suddenly unfurls from the rafters.
Market Theatre is presenting its revival of the play from October 2013 with three of that production’s original cast members – Mbangeni, Dube and Hamilton Dhlamini, who plays Patrick, one of Queeny’s regulars. Mbangeni is marvellous as Queeny, filled with tension and almost not daring to hope that things could change for the better. Her Queeny blossoms whenever Johnny is near but even then her smile can’t conceal all of the pain and disappointment that lies behind it.
Nat Ramabulana is very sympathetic as Johnny. He gives Johnny an optimism that tries to pretend it comes naturally when it clearly doesn’t. As with Mbangeni, Ramabulana always suggests in Johnny a sadness that underlies even his happiest moments.
Pakamisa Zwedala’s Sam is a man who is used to having his way, but the possibility of Queeny’s departure shows up his weakness since it so clearly strikes him with fear. Both Desmond Dube as Blackie and Hamilton Dhlamini as Patrick are very physical performers. Dube’s Blackie is a pitiable character who adores Queeny simply because she is kind to him. Dhlamini has a hilarious turn as a man who gets drunk because his wife is going to have her fifth child all the while giving contradictory reasons why he needs another drink when he is already near to falling asleep.
Fugard’s plays are meant to provoke questions, and the prime question Nongogo asks is why the play has to end the way it does. One answer is that the pain both Queeny and Johnny have suffered in the past makes them distrust the feeling of happiness much as they want to believe happiness is possible. Fugard’s analysis of the psychology of an oppressed people is trenchant and is delivered with full impact in Ngcobo’s finely detailed production. Be sure to see it during the short time it is here.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Desmond Dube as Blackie and Masasa Mbangeni as Queeny; Masasa Mbangeni as Queeny and Tony Kgoroge as Johnny. ©2013 Ruphin Coudyzer.
For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.
2015-04-09
Nongogo