TOWNSHIP
STORIES / GOODNESS
Traverse
Theatre, Edinburgh
August, 2006
*** / ****
I have long been exercised by the
question of whether some international productions are simply
patronised by their British audiences as a form of exotica. Paul
Grootboom sets out precisely to avoid such a possibility. Township Stories (which he directs
and co-wrote with Presley Chweneyagae) is devoid of twangling guitars,
rope-jumping or any of the cliches of happy black South Africa. Instead
we see serial murder, casual police brutality and a life in which
alcoholism, sex and violence are the mainstays. It is a shocking
corrective to the sanitised version of the RSA more often peddled to
us. Grootboom heightens the disjunction by staging most of the violence
to the soundtrack of quiet, beautiful music: a father/son rape central
to the plot is backed by Paul Simon's "Slip Slidin' Away". The device
is overused and grows predictable, nor is the script terribly subtle,
but it is an impeccably performed slap in the face of the kind we need
to rouse us from our complacency.
Michael Redhill's Goodness is
a similarly challenging piece, but in a quite different dramatic
register, right from the opening speech in which Redhill as a character
within his own play at once explains that what follows is based on a
true story and positions it unambiguously as a story. As "Redhill" hears more
and more of a tale of genocide in an unspecified location, and the
subsequent attempt to try the principal provocateur (now apparently
suffering from Alzheimer's disease), writer and characters engage
increasingly in dialogues and interrogations that break the frame of
the story. The questions are always of the same kind: "What would you have done?", "How would you feel?" Lines are blurred
further by director Ross Manson placing his actors among the audience:
as they emerge and melt back, they seem to bring these moral dilemmas
with them to wash around us all as we sit together. Manson's production
for the Canadian Volcano company is small-scale and unfussy, but it is
the most rigorous and complex moral examination I have seen this
festival season.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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