What (whose) remains? Struggle, love? Disruption
Although the National Arts Festival is too gargantuan a terrain for a lone explorer to wrap his feet around, interpretations of this year’s theme of disruption abound whichever way one may turn.
Nadia Davids’s What Remains,a play directed by Jay Pather which looks at a grim archaeological discovery as the site of a contest between “memory and history”, fits neatly into the theme.
What Remains began as a possible novella, based loosely on the 2003 discovery of a grave site at Prestwich Place in Cape Town. The site turned out to be one of the largest slave burial grounds to be unearthed in the southern hemisphere, having housed close to 3 000 bodies.
In her treatment of the story, Davids moves away from a specific setting, opting for a more generalised Cape Town, which in turn becomes a metaphor for where South Africa finds itself today.
The characters in the play are arche- types, with Faniswa Yisa playing the archaeologist, Denise Newman is both the healer and the chair of a development consortium, and Buhle Ngaba the student. Shaun Oelf, a dancer, provides a ghoulish presence symbolic of the uncovered bones.
As a production, What Remains is sleek, atmospheric and briskly paced. Much of the pacing has to do with Ngaba’s unrelenting energy. Ngaba’s role, which evolved from being a narrator, sees her as the connective tissue in the story. She spews out facts and hypotheses and analyses the unfolding drama as a witness to history unwilling to be contained by the sidelines.
Ngaba is a great conduit for the tension that drives Davids’s story. Newman, too, by playing roles that represent polar opposites — a capitalist developer and the healer visited by the spirits of the dead — enhances the production’s kinetic drive.
It is perhaps all this brilliance at hand that gives the impression that What Remains functions more on an intellectual level than on an emotive one.
I struggled with this feeling for hours, even speaking to Davids about the very idea of complicity, a thread brought up by Pather’s seating layout, which sees audiences face each other as they watch the play.
“Isn’t this how ordinary people feel, on some level?” she asked. “That we are watching things unfold and unravel before us and it’s hard to get a grip around them, to decide how one acts in different moments. What does one do? All our positions involve complicity in different ways at different times.”
Perhaps this is the crux of the discomfort generated by What Remains.