THEATRE
Small Play with a Giant Heart
Production: Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater
Those of us who are fanatical about theatre know there are some artists you never give a miss. Neil Coppen is one of those. His work is thoughtful, inspirational, evocative, and always challenges you with where you live and who you are. DIANE DE BEER takes a closer look at Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater which is being presented at the Woordfees.
Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater is an exquisite example of Neil Coppen’s way of making theatre, while also introducing audiences to the work of Empatheatre and its three co-directors – Neil, Mpume Mthombeni and Dylan McGarry, who are all involved in the making of this seemingly small play, but with a giant heart.
In a conversation, the three of them talk about the origin and making of the play. Neil and Mpume (the actor in Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater) live and make theatre in KwaZulu-Natal, which is the inspiration for their storytelling.
However, Coppen acknowledges that KZN, for all its beauty and magic, has always been a land of extremes. “There is this underlying sense that things could erupt into chaos at any moment, and here I refer to chaos due to either political instability or forces such as natural disasters.
“Isidlamlilo was literally born during one of those eruptions,” he notes. The writing of the play was in fact set in motion during the July 2021 riots. And doesn’t this say everything about artists. They don’t just stand and look. They engage and tell the stories.
It was just post-Covid when the province erupted. Neil describes it thus: “For several days we were surrounded by the sounds of gunfire and helicopters hovering overhead. Malls and factories were looted and set alight and toxic plumes of smoke blackened the skies and poisoned the rivers. In the absence of any sort of police protection, armed citizens began patrolling the neighbourhoods and erecting makeshift barricades across road entrances and exits. It was an incredibly dystopian and terrifying moment in time, and I remember calling Mpume and saying: ‘I don’t know what to do with this anxiety. I don’t know where to put it.’”
“Isidlamlilo was literally born during one of those eruptions,” he notes. The writing of the play was in fact set in motion during the July 2021 riots. And doesn’t this say everything about artists. They don’t just stand and look. They engage and tell the stories.
It was just post-Covid when the province erupted. Neil describes it thus: “For several days we were surrounded by the sounds of gunfire and helicopters hovering overhead. Malls and factories were looted and set alight and toxic plumes of smoke blackened the skies and poisoned the rivers. In the absence of any sort of police protection, armed citizens began patrolling the neighbourhoods and erecting makeshift barricades across road entrances and exits. It was an incredibly dystopian and terrifying moment in time, and I remember calling Mpume and saying: ‘I don’t know what to do with this anxiety. I don’t know where to put it.’”
“…so few of us have any inkling of the lives of others.”
From this conversation, they were reminded about an interview that had haunted them from an earlier project years before. It was with a woman at the Thokoza Hostel who had served the IFP as an assassin in the 1980s when KZN was drawn into a long civil war in the build-up to the first democratic elections.
“There was something about Zenzile’s story that helped articulate the current moment we found ourselves in, helped us to grapple with the political messiness, the disappointments, deceptions, and frustrations that had led to a recurrence of this mayhem. All art, I believe, is born from the channelling of a series of questions and anxieties and I suppose this play became a way for us to mould the raw materials of that moment into something more tangible, something more constructive than stockpiling canned foods and watching the news.”
The first scene they wrote was in fact the main character (played by Mpume) Zenzile’s final “I’m still here” monologue and was written with the sound of helicopters and police sirens wailing outside. “The only way I knew how to move through the fear was to write,” explains Neil. “Zenzile, it seemed, had survived it every waking minute of her life. It was in moments such as the one we were facing that she knew exactly what to do.” And thus, she became his guide in the writing.
For Mpume it was a battle to portray and empathise with a character like Zenzile, so far removed from her own life. She found it tough to grapple with the life of someone who had done unspeakable things. How did she come to be this person, she asked. “What would I have done? I came to realise that no matter how big your hardship is, or how small your hardship, if it’s hard… it’s hard.”
Dylan noted that growing up in KZN, they were all surrounded by Hindu, Christian, and Zulu mythologies, with the divine feminine very present in all of these. “So, working in that chaos of 2020 and 2021, finding your way out of it, witnessing your shadow selves, and asking our grandmothers to guide us, I suppose we could say from this a kind of new, richly South African and deeply KZN goddess emerges in Zenzile.”
Neil concurs. “During the writing of the play we were very interested in looking at the myths that exist around women, the goddesses of carnage and revenge. The courageous, complicated and often misunderstood figures from out of different mythologies.”
“The only way I knew how to move through the fear was to write.”
It all began with 10 oral histories from the Thokoza Hostel, recalls Mpume. And Dylan reminds them that during this time they both reflected on how even rural Zulu women are migrants in their own country, and how the lives of migrant women in Durban required a careful kind of listening.
A lot of the work they do as Empatheatre is ultimately about: Where is home? What is home? Where do we belong? This is a strong recurring theme in Isidlamlilo, Dylan says.
Zenzile’s story is so much about the yearning to return to paradise. A desperate sense to belong in the land of your ancestors, a land where you are free to move, plant your own food and provide for your family.
“Space to have time to think and sit on your balcony and drink umqombothi and return to rituals and traditional practices. South Africa’s past and current history is tragically one of so many paradises robbed and rubbished… so many communities moved and fractured,” adds Neil.
Yet sadly, while that is the life of many, so few of us have any inkling of the lives of others. Most of us are unaware of the untold riches of our middle-class lives. We were born with those and take them all for granted.
For the set, one of the first things they did was pour over photographer Angela Buckland’s powerful photo essay on the women living in this hostel, a body of work that captured the intimate details of various inhabitants’ lives.
“It was so important that the audience feel the smallness of the world that Zenzile has been forced to inhabit and Greg King’s set beautifully creates these limitations. This giant life you know… this operatic story squeezed into a tiny matchbox,” says Neil.
Because men are not allowed to enter the hostel, Mpume had to do the scouting. “I spent time there and tried to memorise all the details of the place. The women are forced to live in very cramped tiny little spaces that are literally concrete cubicles. We really wanted the audience to feel that intimacy in the storytelling, in the design. I knew a lot of the women there. These mamas were so much like the grandmothers in my own life.”
When watching the play itself, what seems to the audience – looking at a woman, ageing, alone in a room with probably all her worldly possessions – as a small life, is given towering proportions as this magnificent Shakespearean monologue starts spilling forth.
“All art, I believe, is born from the channelling of a series of questions and anxieties and I suppose this play became a way for us to mould the raw materials of that moment into something more tangible, something more constructive than stockpiling canned foods and watching the news.”
All of this takes place amid a nightmarish storm, which recalls the floods as well as the stormy life of Zenzile, who is being purged through this devastating, often delirious unfolding of the life of one of millions of women in similar circumstances.
Few of us would even handle one of these events that seem to consume her whole being as the disasters roll in and out at regular intervals. The word Home Affairs is enough to draw sighs of despair as we think of the rows and rows of people seen queueing in the distance on a monthly basis as they wait to collect their grants, often the only lifeline for an extended family.
Hand in hand with the story that seems to span many lives, generations and cycles of violence is the performance by the magnificent Mpume. She transforms Zenzile in a matter of minutes as she draws on all her skills to explore this heart-wrenching embodiment of a woman whose life depends on her being a warrior.
This is startling yet stunning theatre which explores invisible South African lives by shining the light brightly on a life valiantly lived.
*
Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater at the Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees
28 SEPT 11:00 | 29 SEPT 20:00 | 30 SEPT 17:00 20:30 | 1 OCT 10:00
100 min | HMS Bloemhof Skoolsaal
R190 | R220 at the door
No u.16 (V)
Book here
Theatre Discussions
Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater
Creators Neil Coppen and Mpume Mthombeni talk about the play which was recently awarded a Naledi for best production of a play.
30 SEPT 11:30
60 min | SU Museum Annex
Free
