Generations

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, the backbone of this performance.

As you enter the space, you’re spirited away by the choir in full song. It is an explosion of the senses with song, dance and food (the women of the family are on stage cooking) on display. The choir sings several rounds, firing 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, 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 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 the audience to decipher through subtext and suggestive choral moods, perfectly arranged by Pauline Malefane.

The departure of loved ones is a theme that most of us will deal with in our lives, and at best we hope for peaceful departures, but what Debbie Tucker Green puts on stage in (seemingly) simple, almost game-like manner, is the fragility and vulnerability of some lives over others. Generations is a solemn piece with that leaves its audience in a state of serious contemplation.