FISHERS OF HOPE – Tawaret. Written and directed by Lara Foot, with Mncedisi Shabangu, Phillip Tipo Tindisa, Lesedi Job, Phillip Dikotla and Shaun Oelf. Musician Nceba Gongxeka. Set design Patrick Curtis. Soundscape The Carnell Collective. Lighting Benever Arendse. Choreography Grant van Ster. Videography Nina Swart. At Flipside, Baxter Theatre until August 2. TRACEY SAUNDERS reviews
FOR Emily Dickinson Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul”. For Foot it is a pulse that beats through many of her plays and in Fishers of Hope, the beat is resounding.
She has a canny ability to address uncomfortable social issues in a manner that is beautiful and thought-provoking and here she again peels off the outer layer of a community, as she did in Tshepang and Karoo Moose, to reveal the individual lives and loves behind the broad narrative. Subtitled Tawaret, the play is set in Kisumu, a small fishing village in western Kenya.
While the writer has left the confines of South African politics with this script, she tells a broad African tale that could be unfolding anywhere on the continent.
This work sketches one family’s struggle to survive in a place where aid is considered a necessity, but which has the capacity to export vast quantities of natural resources, from fish to flowers, and coal to cobalt.
The strength of Foot’s writing is in the characters she creates: people you come to care about deeply.
At the heart of Tawaret is Ruth, a woman of love and courage who lives up to her biblical namesake in mannerism and deed.
The biblical theme is woven through the play; fishing, characters’ names, the three thwarted attempts at motherhood and in the carefully chosen religious icons displayed on the shelves of the home.
The statue of Mary may be small, but the place of women in this narrative is not and it is Ruth’s quiet strength and relentless hope that drive the play.
Lesedi Job plays the role with an almost enigmatic sense of grace. Her anger and despair may bubble under the surface, but – as for many women in Africa – she bears her circumstances in silence.
When her emotions explode through the surface it is her disappointment at being denied an education, her frustration with the necessary lies told to protect a family’s virtue, that rankle the most.
The village in which she lives is one “in which nothing ever happens” and Niara, her brother, leaves in pursuit of knowledge and freedom. Even his name, which means “one with a high purpose” in Swahili, sets him apart. As the favoured son he is granted the benefit of a tertiary education and returns as the prodigal father.
He views the rural environment with scorn and is disparaging of the daily struggles of his family and scornful of his injured brother-in-law. His attempts to lure his son Peter from his trauma-induced muteness seem futile and are heartbreaking to observe.
Phillip Dikotla plays the part to perfection. He carries the naive innocence of youth alongside the arrogance of education and travel and epitomises the divide between rural and urban Africa. Following the success of Skierliek, which garnered a Fleur du Cap award and a nomination at the Zabalaza festival last year, this young actor’s career is on an upward trajectory.
The writer has returned to the theme of fatherless children which she has explored so deftly in her previous work.
Alongside this are children who are deprived of mothering, while Njawu, the convivial taxi driver, plays the unusual role of a single father. Mncedisi Sabangu is magnificent in this role and one feels a compulsion to board his taxi and travel wherever the path may lead.
He transports the “saviours” of Africa who come to save anything from moths to rhinos and are liberal in their dispensing of aid and advice, but are rather less forthcoming with common sense and compassion. His caricatures of aid workers, NGO staff, American tourists and Chinese businessmen are uncomfortably recognisable. His is the African male narrative that doesn’t make headlines, the provider, the peacemaker and the one who smooths troubled waters.
Woven into the personal narrative as deftly as the continuous roar of the overhead planes is the environmental threat the community faces. The alien fish species that destroy the indigenous population and the ravages of unsustainable fishing methods lead to increasing levels of poverty and contribute to the relentless tyranny of the debt and aid cycle. This is no “single-issue” play and the narrative is dense with text and subtext.
Taweret is also a visual and aural delight. With the consistency and certainty of tides, waves of music undulate through the piece. The soundscape is evocative, distinctly African yet with a universal resonance that adds another visceral layer to the production’s multisensory appeal.
The set is a thing of beauty and Patrick Curtis has outdone himself. The surreal quality of many of the scenes unfolds against a backdrop of fishing nets that appear to be flying heavenward.
The water lapping at the shores feels all-enveloping and in one sequence is echoed in Ruth’s washtub, the vastness of the natural landscape reflected in the minute detail of the individual’s life. Curtis has captured the limitations of the small abode and the vastness of the body of the water, replete with an actual lake on stage.
The video installation is exquisitely beautiful and realistic enough that one feels the movement of the water depicted on stage.
A review of the documentary film, Darwin’s Nightmare, one of the inspirations for the play says “its reach extends far beyond questions of policy and political economy, and it turns the fugitive, mundane facts... into the stuff of tragedy and prophecy”. The play echoes this and yet the director sows the seeds of a future possibility. Here there is hope; in each other, in oneself, in love, in tradition, in something bigger. Hope, like faith, is something that cannot be seen.
l Tickets are R110, R120 and R140 and R50 for school bookings. To book, call Computicket at 0861 915 8000.