Powerful play’s potshot at politicians
THE recent devastation of homes and loss of lives in Knysna and parts of the Eastern Cape has served to bring to attention the crisis of fire but, as Fire House graphically points out, the even greater crisis is how a failure to provide decent housing for the poor has spawned a shack fire horror which regularly kills the most vulnerable, many of them children.
The play takes us through the daily lives of three firemen, vibrantly played by Katlego Letsholonyana, Ryan Dittmann and Tebogo Machaba. They have a deep brotherhood expressed through humour and playfulness, until the next alarm calls them to action – and the next dangerous and traumatic event in their lives.
Rhodes University drama school-educated director, Kirsten Harris, says the actors were trained and given insights into firefighter culture by firefighters in Berea, Johannesburg, under the leadership of department platoon commander Lizelle Delport. She said Delport was a force to be reckoned with, but had a softer side.
Despite the ingrained culture of “brotherhood” among firefighters the truth is more diversified. Harris shows me a wedding picture of Delport marrying the love of her life, a woman.
The play cleverly works with two intertwined phases of the life of a firefighter, downtime, and crisis time, where lives are at risk and lost.
The set is simple and clever. A two-piece ladder, a draadkar toy fire engine, yellow boots and hats, red crates and a smoke machine, working as shape-shifters to match the scene.
There is a palpable pause when the firefighters, alarms ringing, get into their fire engine and try and turn the starter key.
It’s funny when they all rock and will the engine to start but we sigh in relief when it kicks into life. The point is sharply made about the calamity spawned by highlypaid bureaucrats failing to repair and maintain fire engines and equipment.
There is a theme in this workshopped play, which links the metaphor of fire used so often in the strident and florid speeches of politicians and that fact that when there is an actual blaze and people are trapped and dying and in need of rescue, the politicians are “nowhere to be found”.
The storyline, however, moves this play. We laugh and we cry at the drama, but afterwards director Harris says it is based on the true story of how, in 2014, firefighters Daniel Zwane and Michael Letsosa died in a blazing basement.
Zwane had called his colleagues on his cellphone and said: “I am dying. I can feel my soul leaving my body.” Firefighters at their funeral turned their back on their boss during his speech.
Their T-shirts had pictures Zwane and Letsosa on them. They sang the traditional South African song of lament: Senzeni na (What have we done.)
I have seen many critical political pieces at the festival, and at a time in society when the machinations of high politics has taken on almost narcissistic fascination, this is a rare work which poignantly and powerfully brings to life politics at a municipal level, where most people are affected.