The much-anticipated stage production of Damon Galgut’s novel The promise premiered at the Homecoming Centre Theatre in Cape Town this week. The novel won the Booker Prize in 2021.
The story takes place on a farm near Pretoria and revolves around a mother’s dying wish to her spouse, patriarch of the Swart family. He eagerly makes her a promise, with every intent of implementing it, but a moment of hesitation becomes a deliberate delay. The years pass, taking us from the genesis of the promise in the late 1980s and into the era post-1994. Across the country, there is optimism in the air, but change – like the promise – turns out not as expected. And, tumour-like, a darkness spreads.
The only other witness to the Swart couple’s pact is their youngest daughter, and she just won’t let it go. From there, the unravelling begins.
For the players in the stage production of The promise, it is a marathon performance that runs to two hours (with a short interval), but sheer talent and experience meet the writing to make it timelessly captivating. And here, one simply cannot ignore the contributions of sound, costume and set design, lighting and choreography.
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This is theatre and theatre-making at its best.
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This is theatre and theatre-making at its best.
For example, the centrepiece is a timber platform constructed at a variety of tilted angles. Despite the characters’ best efforts at normality, something fundamental to their world – the very ground beneath their feet – is off. Extra effort is required to maintain the appearance of it. All at the same time, the stage and its various devices echo the slide of lives and the distortion of time and perception.
While it remains largely the same throughout, design supports the internal journey the story takes us on. At times, ropes and pulleys lend the feel of a ship, perhaps the fo’c’s’le of a sinking ship, or a raft adrift; or, they are used backstage for a show of marionettes. Irrepressible happenings emerge from the invisible, unsettling underneath and into the world above.
The set includes a sound box employed as track-maker, eerie at times but also for the comedy. Yes. Perhaps the piece’s moments of levity provide the temporary relief we crave. But it is a fact of life that all tragedies are marked by it.
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” declares Samuel Beckett’s Nell in Endgame, and that is certainly true here, too.
The story progresses on finely balanced ripples of highs and lows that draw us into the blazing centre that is the mushroom cloud from which no one escapes.
In its relation to Galgut’s novel, the play stands firmly within its own power while simultaneously returning the light to this monument of contemporary South African writing. It is a credit, once again, to the team, which includes the author. In the same way that the book tells the story from the perspectives of its various characters, meticulous casting empowers every single actor to disappear completely into their role.
Taking on work of such great and recent acclaim as The promise must be cripplingly daunting on many levels – not least of all for the youngest of the cast, Jane de Wet and Sanda Shandu, who shine. That it all has come off so brilliantly can be testament only to the leadership, financial backers and depth of experience assembled.
Speaking from the stage afterwards, Galgut echoed the sentiments of Adam Small at the first stage adaptation of the beloved writer’s own celebrated novel Kanna hy kô Hystoe. Life had been brought to his book, he said.
If not the theatre production of the year, The promise is certainly and undeniably among the must-see events of the year.
Damon Galgut’s The promise on stage
Adapted for the stage by Damon Galgut and Sylvaine Strike
With: Chuma Sopotela, Rob van Vuuren, Kate Normington, Sanda Shandu, Cintaine Schutte, Jane de Wet, Jenny Stead, Frank Opperman and Albert Pretorius
Sound design and original music composition by Charl-Johan Lingenfelder, set and lighting design by Josh Lindberg, costume design by Penny Simpson and choreography by Natalie Fisher
Directed by Sylvaine Strike
The play is currently on at Cape Town’s Homecoming Centre until 6 October, and at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg from 18 October to 5 November. It has a rating of PG13. Bookings via Webtickets.
Kommentaar
Mr Robberts, you write: "That it all has come off so brilliantly can be testament only to the leadership, financial backers and depth of experience assembled....It is a credit, once again, to the team, which includes the author "
Without the creative vision and experience of the director, Sylvaine Strike, there would not have been a stage production, and yet, you do not mention, congratulate or evaluate her contribution that made it all possible?
read also:
https://www.litnet.co.za/the-promise-by-damon-galgut-a-book-review/