7 March 2007 Written by Andrew Eglinton Print This Post  Email This Post

There’s time enough in 30 minutes to sway the moon, to fall in love and to be moved to tears, and last night at the Young Vic proved long enough for all this and more. Generations is a new play by Debbie Tucker Green, directed by Sacha Wares with music by Pauline Malefane and sound by Paul Arditti. The piece is staged in the round and at centre stands a modest yet fully functional kitchen, inhabited by 3 generations of a South African family. The audience sits round the stage on beer crates and stools, nestled in a bed of deep red earth, the same vibrant colour that dresses Table Mountain in the Western Cape and many other of South Africa’s evocative landscapes. Dotted all around and behind the audience are the members of a powerful choir - indeed the backbone of this performance.

As you enter the space, any memory of the Cut in all its winter dreariness is gone in a flash and you’re spirited away by the mesmeric sound of the choir in full song. It is an explosion of the senses with all the redeeming elements of humanity on display: song, dance and food (the women of the family are on stage cooking). The choir sings several rounds of songs and fires up a frenzy in the audience who, though slow off the mark, soon get drawn into foot-tapping, head-bopping and clapping to the beat. When the singing subsides and the choir takes its position at the periphery, Debbie Tucker Green’s text begins.

Like the circle songs that graced the opening, the writing also works in circular form. The dialogue between generations is quickly established as a skat-like repetition of speech around the themes of cooking and courtship. It is set up so that each of the six characters on stage and one young man off stage in the corner, gets a part in the canon. The first round of dialogue is very comical, exposing each of the character’s idiosyncrasies with battles of opinion on who taught who to cook and who flirted with who first; old and young, father and wife, mother and daughters, all respond with grit and fervor. But after the first round is over, there’s a momentary pause in the action, and a choral lament accompanies the youngest daughter as she makes a slow and solemn exit.

Once she has left the stage the next round of dialogue begins, and little by little the characters leave the stage in order of age, working themselves down to just the two grandparents. They are left to staring in hollow despair; they’ve outlived their children, they’ve outlived their grandchildren and for a moment the order of their world is spun out and over turned.

Few words in the text change from beginning to end, but when they do it is all the more poignant. And although nothing explicit is said about where, when, who or how, two words in the last cycle of speech, ‘dying’ and ‘disease’ evoke something of South Africa’s downhill struggle with HIV AIDS. The rest is up to us to decipher from subtext and the suggestive choral moods, perfectly arranged by Pauline Malefane.

It was fascinating to me, to see just what an effect this piece had on the audience. On the opposite side I noticed a group of local high school students, there no doubt on a school assignment, and though they had responded with jocular verve throughout the performance, when the lights came back up for the curtain call, their was a moment of gripping silence with sleeves over eyes on all sides. The departure of loved ones is a theme that most of us will deal with in our lifetimes, and at best we can only hope for peaceful departures, but what Debbie Tucker Green brings on stage in (seemingly) simple, almost game-like manner, is the fragility and vulnerability of some lives over others. And in the context of modern South Africa, the premature loss of friends and family has been all too common an occurrence; ravaged by the British and Dutch colonial forces (in amongst others), bled to despair by despotic Apartheid regime and now eaten from the insides by a haunting AIDS pandemic.

The former two travesties now occupy row upon row of archive space in lirbraries, institutions and private collections worldwide, a source of learning to pave the way forward for a decent world, but also a source of warning to quell the sinister colonial yearning that lies (dormant?) in all powers great or small. HIV AIDS on the other hand is an organism that is very much alive and well. It is rampant and devastating, and with the heavy loss of human life comes an ever-increasing embarrassment not only for president Thabo Mbeki and the men and women of South Africa who fought for its freedom in the world today, but also on the International community as a whole. This disease may not yet be curable, but measures to hault its propagation must be increased. We’ve achieved HIV awareness in the UK, there’s no reason it cannot be achieved in South Africa. Sadly though, something tells me that it will take an event the size of the World Cup to bring the necessary international exposure of this ordeal to the table. How endless does the night have to be, before we see sweet delight?

This play is only on for a couple more days until the 10th of March, just go, you won’t regret it! If you’re looking for great theatre ticket deals on this show or any other major event in London then I recommend using www.viagogo.co.uk.

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Photograph Credits

Top photo by Keith Pattison with Claire Prempeh, Michele Austin, Davinia Anderson.
Middle photo by Keith Pattison with Michele Austin, Louis Mahoney, Nomhle Nkonyeni.
Bottom photo by Keith Pattison. Louis Mahoney, Nomhle Nkonyeni.

Link to Young Vic Press section.