To be heard

Women’s voices roar in theatre – disrupting, challenging their silencing and marginalisation

Abrahams and Matchett have interwoven threads of their own experiences – intertwined with the stories of these women.

Abrahams: “My own personal story is woven through the piece, and my own experiences and the characterisations of my maternal grandmothers, as told by my mother, colour the character portrayals. We are referring to an episode from Draupadi’s life – the trial that occurs after one of her husbands, Dharma, gambles her away as a slave. [She is married to all five Pandawa brothers.]

“In this episode, the court denies her the rights of a ‘decent’ woman and demands that she be stripped naked, as befits her status as a slave and prostitute. So once again the female body comes up against the law of the land.”

I was interested to find out about Zara. Abrahams said: “She was a servant from a very young age and raised as a ‘Hollands Hottentot’; isolated from tribal life, speaking Dutch, encultured and Christianised.

“At the time, it was the practice to remove indigenous children from their parents – as colonists did with Native American and Aboriginal children. The legally enforced abduction of Khoisan children was practised right through English rule in South Africa. Khoisan parents were forced to give up their children to be apprenticed and ‘civilised’.

“In the play, Zara’s story weaves this thread of trafficked children, taken from their roots to be underlings in someone else’s culture, across time.”

Abrahams and Matchett have been quoted as saying Womb of Fire “is not a lament. It is a roar”.

Abrahams: “I think the time for safe and non-threatening is long over. The work is confrontational. It’s disruptive.

It’s not safe. It’s also empowering, vivifying, uplifting, retrieving and passionate. It’s not a bedtime story or a lullaby. Of course, the women’s lives are not just ugly and horrific, they’ve also experienced love and joy and transformation and beauty and pleasure.”

Matchett: “The necessity to challenge the silencing and marginalisation of women’s voices in theatre is evident. My work with The MotherTongue Project derives from a particular ideological position informed by the context in which I locate.

“South Africa has some of the highest rates of rape and sexualised violence against women in the world. The result is a society in which women’s bodies, in particular, are constantly under threat of violation… It is necessary to challenge the silencing and marginalisation of women’s stories, and theatre and performance is a means to achieve this.”

● Tickets are R100 for Womb of Fire. Age restriction – no under 13s. Book through Webtickets,

Pick n Pay or the Baxter.