It's always a pleasure to receive dramatic bulletins from post-apartheid South Africa, especially from a new generation of playwrights treading in the venerable footsteps of Athol Fugard. Disappointingly, this two-hander from writer-director Lara Foot remains stubbornly unconvincing both in its setting and its emotional resonance.
Marion (Janet Suzman) is an ageing divorcée, whose daughter has joined the brain drain to Australia, living in not-so-splendid isolation in a fading house somewhere outside a town. Into her bare, unlocked kitchen one day walks a young black man, Solomon (Khayalethu Anthony). The tension of this initial intrusion is misguidedly underplayed; it’s too swiftly revealed that he is the grandson of her former maid and too slowly explained as to why he has pitched up.
An odd-couple friendship inevitably ensues, before we learn the real reason for Solomon’s arrival. Anthony plays his role with likeable warmth and just the right degree of inscrutability, but Suzman turns Marion into the sort of stubborn, verbose, over-emphatic older lady who tends to occur only in drama.
The set hints at genteel poverty, but Foot fails to elaborate upon this potentially fruitful point. Marion’s emotions – and the script certainly calls for these, as it touches on South Africa’s frightening crime rates – all seem external, rather than drawn from a wellspring of genuine feeling. I was also perplexed as to why a character who has spent her entire life in South Africa, albeit from English stock, should have no trace of that country’s distinctive accent.
A series of peremptory scene breaks adds to the curiously underpowered feel of the production and considerably more juice could be squeezed out of the 2009 setting, a year before South Africa’s landmark hosting of the World Cup.
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