SUBURBAN ANGST IN THE NEW SA
There’s nothing like a tight, awkward comedy of neighbourhood strife, where neighbourly differences reveal unexpected fissures within the couples, and tiny points of lifestyle niggle, heat up and explode into wider issues of capitalism and power. . Think of GOD OF CARNAGE, CLYBOURNE PARK, or one of the darker TV sitcoms . In such showed we expect – and here we ferociously get – ludicrous but painful social distinctions, resentments, middle-class passive-aggression and the occasional burst of rage. Doing it right takes deft acting and a particular kind of tightly-bottled sincerity of character. These too are pretty well served here.
It’s a South African suburb, Stillwater. A black couple (Sifiso Mazibuko and Mimi M Khayisa) find themselves after living there two years suddenly befriended and entertaining one set of white neighbours. Christopher and Lynette, are reluctantly impressed that the black hosts are sophisticates: Sihle is a high-salaried finance man and they’ve been to Italy. Bonolo, drifting around in a purple kaftan , pours the Merlot through an “aerator” and speaks of fine wine and the beauties of Sardinia. The white visitors (Kai Luke Brummer and Olivia Darnley) admit that their travel is generally to visit a sister in Swindon. First top laugh from the Royal Court Audience there….
They all try to be warm. And non-racist, and modern. But there are glitches. Christopher, a mass of ‘white fragility’, speaks of another white neighbour who hasn’t got promotion because “in this climate” there is a ceiling. Though of course the rise of chaps like Sihle is “about time” . The host, amused, taunts him a little. It becomes apparent that the reason for the sudden rapprochement is that the white couple want to set up a neighbourhood group to protest against a newly erected shack on some waste ground down the road, suspected of housing unseen squatters. In Ultz’s teasing design the shack is always there in the background, tin-roofed but with obvious windows and door. Not a good house, but a home..perhaps…which is threatening. Another local suburb, they fear, was ‘overrun” with such shanty-town arrivals.
There’s a rather wonderful time-stops moment when, with the white couple still sitting unwitting on the sofa, a slight lighting change shows Khaysa and Mazibuko in their minds are rolling about hysterically laughing at the obviousness of the guests’ mission, and at the fact that “We’re black ! Black! But we’re Insiders!”. Back in conversation, Christopher’s horrified description of how the cul-de-sac’s peace might be broken soon, by a family of eight or ten crammed into the shack, cooking odd food and playing odd music. Whereon Bonolo, their hostesll, says that down in the Cape that could have described her childhood . This later turns out not to be quite true. Everyone likes to polish their own legend.
The action rolls on to a third couple, younger and poorer and right next to the shack, where the young husband (Scott Sparrow) is almost hysterical with dread about it pulling down the house prices. Mistaken identity and more moments of pass-ag and open rage follow.
Full disclosure: at the height of apartheid in the early 1960s my Dad was posted to Johannesburg and I spent a year partly at a boarding school with some derangedly racist nuns, partly at home in the suburbs where next door’s kids were banned from playing with us because we swam and larked in the pool with the black servant’s kids. So after watching over the years from afar the release of Mandela’, the ANC ’s rise to power and the joy and subsequent disappointments of South Africa, I was mad keen to see Any Jephta’s play (in association with Bristol and the Johannesburg Market Theatre) for some kind of insight into how the new deal might work out at the basic ,social , black-next-door level.
For logistic reasons I nipped into the antepenultimate preview not press night. So I won’t presume a star rating, though it was excellently played especially by Mazibuko. But it did feel like a real, rueful insight into how it must be for both sides. The black couple for instance are slightly divided in attitude to the new worls: in his suit-and-tie Sihle has a joshingly obliging determination to fit into what is still a white world and system, at one point admitting the strain of constantly “performing it – performing my education, my salary”. She is more activist, take-back-the-land-for-my-people, but as her husband exasperatedly y points out you can’t be an activist while clinging on to your own privilege (a lesson for the world far beyond SA, indeed).
The white couples are not malicious but yes, fragile: still finding trouble accepting the change, uncomfortable in the “climate’` where they are awkwardly both members of the old oppressor-tribe and , sob, possible victims of antii-white discrimination. Everyone is guarding their own boundaries. And property. Especially poor young Andrew (Sparrow) because he paid even more for his house than the older couples, and his ‘artisan sandwich’ business is not doing too well. There is a surreal moment when they all stare at the shack, and it starts growing in size and grandeur, sprouting a chimney and extension….
We , and they, never even see the shack people. The invasion is all in their heads. But it still hurts. “How much assimilation has to go on before that house is part of Stillwater`~~?” . Lovely, funny, sharp, 100 minutes well worth spending.
ROYALCOURTTHEATRE.COM TO 8 feb
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