Fitting together pieces of the past, only to find a painful truth
BLACK
DIRECTOR: Jade Bowers
CAST: Ameera Patel
VENUE: Alexander Upstairs, until December 17
RATING: ★★★★✩
SOMEWHERE between a family history and a chronicle of South Africa’s chequered evolution from the diamond rush in 19th-century Kimberley to the year 2008, Penelope Youngleson’s adaptation of CA Davids’ Blacks of Cape Town is a compact, 60-minute one-hander with a powerful script.
It demands tight direction to maximise its merits, and if Patel’s performance were subjected to a more rigorous hand, this would be a memorable piece of theatre. As it is, the narrative overwhelms the characters. Patel portrays the lead, Zara Black, as well as a broad spectrum of people from that woman’s past.
The staging is economical and effective in tackling the challenge of constant shifts in time and space: we gravitate between past and present, New Jersey and Cape Town. Patel makes the most of a few basic accessories to suggest change of persona, and modifies body-language and diction as she impersonates members of Zara’s family and acquaintance. Her talent in this regard is impressive, but occasionally there is a lapse which sharper direction would not have permitted.
The journey into Zara’s past is visually traced by two boards, one a family tree dating from the mid-1800s, the other a blackboard recording significant dates in South Africa’s recent history. This cleverly underscores the woman’s academic pedigree (she is a research scholar in the US as that country edges towards the election that gave it its first African-American president).
Black is gravid with racial issues and bouts of anger, justified by a lack of transformation more than a decade after the demise of apartheid (the year is 2008).
As the past is carefully pieced together in the quest for a painful truth, leitmotifs of dishonesty and betrayal emerge, starting with the theft of diamonds by Isiah Black, Zara’s grandfather; nor is the treachery merely personal – it involves politics during and post-apartheid as activists betray their comrades in the Struggle.
Just when it seems that Bleak would be a more appropriate title than Black for the drama, Zara finds her identity and returns to her native land, at peace with her past after coming to terms with its reality.