Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking

Ben Evans at Oval House has brought a show over from South Africa - I was at the Press Night yesterday. The company is Magnet Theatre from Cape Town. The play has a wonderful title - Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking - and that title is horribly appropriate to the theme of displaced people. As the richest country on the African continent (though I bet that's sometimes pretty hard to remember in Soweto), South Africa is the goal for most African refugees. I'd heard quite a lot about the Zimbabwean exodus to South Africa: the characters in this play come from a Francophone country - it's not specified which one.

And, in a way, that's my concern about the piece. It's very sympathetic in its portrayal of refugees, and it's very theatrical - but the characters are just refugees... we don't know from what, or from where, or how the political or cultural or social meltdown which displaced them occurred. And so the play becomes sentimental - it doesn't allow us to be moved to action, only to pity. It doesn't allow us to feel in any way implicated. And we are.

Because of this, all the theatricality (and there's lots, and it's impressive) doesn't really work for me. It's not in the service of real storytelling - it looks whizzkidding. I probably would be more positive about it, except that I've been studying a lot of work about refugees recently for a new MA Module I'm creating for Rose Bruford, and I've come to feel that contextualising the stories, as well as allowing the refugees to be heard, is crucial. The best example is Mnouchkine's Le Dernier Caravanserail. When I met her, she said that play was "A punch on the nose. For everybody."

Mishima

I saw the Stone Crabs double bill of Mishima plays at Oval House last night. It was a bit of a reunion, since I know Kwong Loke (one of the directors), Wai Yin Kwok (designer), Yuka Yamanaka (performer), and bumped into Valerie Lucas, an academic who was in the audience! Small world or what?

The plays are very strange, as you'd expect with Mishima, I suppose. Strangeness is what makes theatre interesting... The first piece, Hanjo, is a three-hander, interestingly played by an all-female cast in this production. It's about a young geisha, who has gone mad with longing for her lover, and is being held by an unmarried woman painter. The gay subtext is very clear, and the fact that when the lover appears, he is played by another woman compounds it. The second piece, about a painter making a screen to represent hell, is remarkable. Yuka plays the painter's daughter, and draws off her knowledge of traditional Japanese dance in a very beautiful and characteristically controlled performance. The rest of the cast (except for the other woman) are Caucasian actors, dressed in modern grey business suits, and the effect is very powerful. Kwong says that the Japanese is deliberately written in an archaic style. I would have loved to hear the translation in a heightened English, like Barker or Barnes. This could have taken it into really fascinating territory. The translation into modern English just seemed a bit too banal for the exotic events portrayed.

Translation is notoriously difficult, of course. I met up with Al Parkinson earlier in the day, to discuss possible technical staff for the Trilogy, and we reminisced about how he'd had to supertitle into a English a scene in Hindi which seemed to change every night. Hopefully, we'll finally tie down the text this time round!

Watching is Work

Just recently, I've been spending a lot of time watching plays (I often do) and films (which is less common, at least for work - but fun!). It does count as work, because the plays I have to see to keep up with the art-form and the actors, and the films are possible inclusions in Origins. On Thursday, I was at the Centre for New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck, where I watched no fewer than nine films in a day - admittedly only two of them features. One of these was the wonderful The Waimate Conspiracy - which manages to turn Maori land claims into a comedy, without being remotely patronising (the opposite, in fact). What makes the film really satisfying is its exploration of different forms of truth and proof. The court refuses to accept that the oral traditions through which Maori tell and preserve their history count as "proof" or "evidence", so they are forced into "forgery", which bizarrely and wonderfully turns out to be more "acceptable" than their own reality... This is ideal dramatic material, of course, and the conceit of shooting it all as if it were documentary adds to the sense of a film exploring different levels of fiction, reality and performance, with clear political implications.

The same evening (you see, it really is hard work...) I'm at the Oval House, to see a new play called Yours Abundantly, From Zimbabwe. It's by Gillian Plowman, and seems in many ways to be autobiographical: like the leading character, Gillian has exchanged letters with young people and teachers from Zimbabwe. I find many of the moral dilemmas around disparities in wealth and our perceptions of one another very familiar, and very frankly portrayed. It's wonderfully designed by my friend Iona McLeish, who manages to use the entire space with a single rake - back-lit and smokey it gives a space of imagination for the Zimbabwean characters, avoiding the representational, which allows the play to be much more clearly about the written words and the imaginative engagement with Africa that comes from it. It's a very beautiful, economical, lyrical production.

And now I'm off to the Australian High Commission for a reception for Bangarra Dance. It actually is work, you know.....