A woman lies on the street in a stupor, drenched in methylated spirits.
Above her, a boy stands with a match, ready to bring about her destruction through a liquid that was already killing her slowly. Throughout the play, alcohol has animated her like some crazed puppet: she laughs, she flirts, and yet she feels nothing. It is her great tragedy that death is merely going to be another kind of oblivion.
This scene of an alcohol-wrecked life could be anywhere in the world, but it represents the final moments of a woman called Sophia in the lively, tragically amusing, innovative take on Cape Town's bergies - or homeless people. Suip - a word that seems somehow to evoke slurping and abandoned enjoyment simutaneously - is Afrikaans for drinking to excess, and the writers, Heinrich Reisenhofer and Oscar Petersen have presented a colourful collage on the various ways in which booze has branded itself on black South African existence.
The production does not instantly convince you of its merits, but after a short time you realise you have been ambushed by its anarchically irreverent energy.
On a stage where beer crates are piled up to represent Table Mountain on one side, and the debris of the city on the other, a line of vagrants shuffles in looking like comedy extras, and a man with a good-natured chipmunk grin introduces himself as Shaun, a poet and intellectual.
Beer-cans become percussive accompaniments to stomped dances, columns of
beer crates transform into stilts, a shopping trolley is a prison cell then a police car. Without a hint of worthiness or damning didacticism, the characters gradually reveal the ways in which alcohol has infiltrated their society - whether through white people's introduction of brandy, farmers paying labourers in booze, or addictions ranging from wine to meths.
Director Heinrich Reisenhofer and a group of students spent a month among the bergies of Cape Town, chronicling their stories and observing their lifestyle. The research has paid off for this emotionally convincing social portrait, which packs a punch at the start of the Celebrate South Africa Festival.
Suip!
