New Voices line-up a mixed bag

ARTSCAPE’S New Voices programme this year concentrates more on different ways of putting across a story rather than whether the writer/director is necessarily a newbie.

Syria aims for a satirical musical note, telling the story of a bigot who tries to get the Muslim friend of her schoolchild expelled from school. Three actors tackled a variety of roles, with Faith Kinniar showing a skilled versatility as she jumps from narrowminded policewoman to curious teenager to putupon, non-conforming mother.

Her main role is that of Constable Valencia Malgas, mother to Lauren whose friendship with welltravelled Walief (Gary Naidoo) is opening her eyes to how Muslim people are treated around the world.

Bigotry about Muslims is pitted against the young Walief ’s very accepting world-view, but throwing in the musical interludes detracts. As good a musician as Peter Faure is, his musical accompaniment is almost an afterthought.

The idea that you eventually break into song because the emotion overwhelms you may be useful in creating a musical, but here it breaks the rhythm and the slowly building tension. The audience’s giggles at Malgas’ negative, opinionated nastiness means that by the time her bigotry is directly pitted against Walief ’s opposing view, her view is not taken seriously. If the aim was to show how her views are actually warped, it doesn’t work because she just comes across as a silly woman, rather than someone whose views should be seriously dissected because they represent how a lot of people see the world.

In(S)kin is loosely shaped around the author/director Mbongeni Mtshali’s memory of being taught English as one of three black children a private allboys boarding school in the late 1980s, but concentrates more on evoking than telling.

While Thembekile Komani directly addresses the audience with his memories, the three dancers and Ntombi Makhutshi support his poetic reminiscences with movement.

They dance and act out rituals which recall familiar and unfamiliar ways of expression, the point being where do we find meaning and act out where we belong in different ways, across culture and gender?

Komani giving voice to Mtshali’s memories reminds you about how we shape our identity through memory and questions what that means for your personality when those memories are actually fabricated.

Between the movement on stage and the words being spoken, you are lulled into a space where you question just how much of who you are is bound up in the language you speak and how this changes when you lose your mother tongue.

Arena Theatre, Artscape until Saturday.