Exploring sounds of father-son relationship

Now showing at the Old Mutual Theatre on the Square from July 13-30, My First Sony is a one-man show with Israeli Roy Horowitz, in the title role of 11-year-old Yotam.

The title refers to Yotam’s obsession with recording every sound uttered by those in his life –  providing an audio diary, and a way of making sense of his world. He needs it, with an irresponsible, womanising father who continually berates the insecure Yotam about his weight problem, criticism serving as mask, and further eroding Yotam’s fragile sense of self.

Horowitz presented the phenomenal play The Time Keepers last year at the same theatre, and brings a similar energy to this one-man show.

In a question-and-answer session after the show, he revealed that he has been playing the role of Yotam, off and on, for the past 15 years. He became intrigued by the novel by Benny Barbashe when he was fresh out of acting school, met the Israeli writer and persuaded him that he was the right man to adapt the book into a play.

The result is a poignant, moving piece of theatre with a rather shocking ending, a beguiling exploration of a father-son relationship filtered through a young boy’s eyes. Highly recommended.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, July 24, 2011)

Spicy blend of personas stirs the emotions

There’s something on the boil at the Market Theatre in the form of Curry Tales, a one-woman show written and performed by Rani Moorthy. Prior to seeing the show, I knew little about the production except that the actress cooks on stage. Sounded rather light and fluffy to me. Well, it is light, in the sense that there are laughs aplenty, but this is no mere parody of a cooking show.

Moorthy has fun with her audience, teasing and cajoling them in an intimate and yet also nonthreatening way. If you’re scared of interactive theatre after having been lampooned by the likes of Mark Banks, put your fear aside. Book a front-row seat, because, yes, Moorthy cooks and you’ll be one of the first to taste the dishes if you’re right up there.

In Curry Tales, Moorthy takes on a number of different personas, cooking up a dish to go with each. The dexterity and the feat of cooking while acting and taking cues from the audience is quite something to watch. “In any one-person show, the audience is the other character,” says Moorthy as I chat to her after having seen the show.

Now resident in London where she first conceived and wrote the show, Moorthy explains how she adapts performances to local mores in each country she plays in. Moorthy is something of a chameleon on stage. She first appears as socialite Mrs Dimple Melwani, a middle-aged New Delhi matriarch who commands the stage with her presence and sassy personality. Ah, this is an actress in her 40s, I thought, but, in the next scene, Moorthy bounds on to the stage as the fiery Trinidadian Rosemary, showing a leg, blasting the man (or men) in her life while stirring a hot curry to feed the audience, and I am reappraising, thinking, no, this is a much younger actress. Moorthy inhabits each character so thoroughly, which is obviously what good acting is about, that you are completely swept away and taken in.

You do chuckle throughout, but there is also an underlying pathos beneath each story. In another sequence, a young Indian woman, Kalvinder, is making curry for her British in-laws.Her husband has forgotten to pick up the mutton, so she is forced to improvise. She hits on the idea of using eggs instead of meat, but while she is chopping and boiling, she tells us about growing up as a barren woman. An Indian woman who cannot have children, reviled by her own mother. This achingly sad sequence goes to the very heart of what constitutes a woman in certain cultures, and how anything that is different from the norm is unacceptable. The heartache this causes in Kalvinder is painful to watch.

But equally moving is the beggar scene in which Moorthy plays a Tamil-speaking beggar, Kali. She doesn’t speak a word of English in this scene, and yet mime, gesture and our own natural human empathy mean we understand every word. The scene ends with the beggar sharing her bowl of curry with the audience. “She hasn’t eaten in two days,” Moorthy says as we discuss this scene, “and yet she gives of her bowl of food. “This just shows that the onus of giving is not one that only the rich can monopolise, it’s a sense of taking power from the act of giving.”

Another powerful scene is that of Mrs Wong, an Indian woman brought up in China and now living in riot-torn Malaysia. She’s chained to her stove by her eldest son, lamenting the fact that she hasn’t learned the words to the national anthem, and recalling a life shaped by emigration. Moorthy is Mrs Wong with a very passable Chinese-inflected accent. Here Moorthy taps directly into her past experiences. Born in Malaysia, she was educated in Singapore, as her parents wanted her to be taught in English. This meant she carried a passport to school every day. Moorthy became a drama lecturer and also hosted a talk show in Singapore. Marrying Briton Arthur Smith meant negotiating a commuter relationship. Deciding to move to England to be with her husband in 1996 at the age of 35 meant starting all over again.

She talks of finding a new voice. “Yet, I think it’s important for artists to leave the artistic homeland, to leave the comfort zone. I didn’t think I would have an audience in Britain.”

Instead, Moorthy had to create another career, cultivate another voice. From this was born a series of plays, including Pooja, which explored ritual in a Hindu woman’s life, Curry Tales, and Shades of Brown, another one-woman show that looks at skin colour and the effect of being perceived as too dark or too light (as in the character of the South African albino). “I invite the audience to look at the discomfort around skin colour, and how we are being prejudiced [by perceptions].”

It’s not a topic that is always openly discussed and Moorthy relates how her own darker skin colour led her family to joke with her not to go out into the sun: the psychological impact of colour. Moorthy has also explored the impact of the Muslim bombings in London in Too Close to Home, a play set in a British Muslim family.

Future projects in the pipeline include further explorations of emigration in writing about gangs of Tamil boys in London who feel disenfranchised in the West as well as a play that looks at feminine energies and what happens when people are taken away from the country of their birth.

Moorthy admits that she is sceptical about nationhood, but “I find it liberating that I am not particularly of any one culture. I can borrow from cultures, telling stories that are human, that people can return too.”

(Published in The Sunday Independent Feb 2008)

Harsh truths about love

Performed at Old Mutual Theatre on the Square, Sandton, Johannesburg

Hard Love is a play inspired by a real incident in the life of Israeli playwright Motti Lerner.

“I met a lovely girl,” he writes, “who later became deeply religious. Our lives were virtually impossible from the outset. One day I saw her quite by chance at the theatre. She was married with many children and had shaved her hair.”

Still wondering what she felt, the seed of an idea was planted and a hard-hitting poignant examination of a relationship, is the result.

Zvi (Ashley Dowds) has come to the religious neighbourhood of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem to see Hannah (Keren Tahor), the woman he divorced 20 years before. They are worlds apart: Zvi has chosen not to become religious, moved away from the neighbourhood after his divorce and has spent the past two decades writing books.

Meanwhile, Hannah has become ultra-orthodox and is devoting herself to motherhood and home, raising a child with a man nearly 30 years older than herself.

Going back and forth over their lives and what each has become, they soon start to reach the real the heart of their conversation. They must discuss the blossoming relationship between Eran and Rivka, ironically their two children from their respective second marriages. How the two teenagers become involved is less important than the fact that they are smitten with each other, much to their parents’ consternation.

This attitude shifts in the play. At first Zvi is amused, and not at all concerned by the relationship which so disturbs Hannah, but as the scene changes, it is Zvi who cannot accept it, while Hannah welcomes it.

The couple were divorced because of the death of their first-born child, and the religious doubts that crept into Zvi’s life after that early trauma.

Hannah has blamed him, saying God punished him for not believing, an idea that has festered throughout the years of her marriage to the only man that would take her, a man twice her age.

“I was divorced, my son had died no one else would have had me,” Hannah explains to Zvi, as he tries to make sense of her life.

In a dance of admissions, guilt and evasion, Hannah and Zvi’s conversation twines through the years, each believing that the other has not been happy in their chosen life. After his second divorce Zvi has flitted from woman to woman, a practice which the religious Hannah cannot condone, or understand.

Early on we learn that Zvi’s mother committed suicide, a martyr to her religion which she saw as imprisoning her. Clearly this early influence has influenced Zvi’s own desire to escape.

There can be no common ground between them, no reaching through that which divides them, despite the love they once felt for each other, and still do.

“To this day all my dreams take place in your street,” says Zvi.

Scenery and viewpoints shift in the second half of the play as we leave the religious neighbourhood of Mea Shearim. We move away from a traditional setting where a lace tablecloth covers the table, the chandelier is dim and old, and the sideboard is probably a piece of furniture passed down through the generations.

We are in secular Tel Aviv, the light is bright, the furniture modern and minimal, all stark lines and white leather. The action plays itself out within this room, as we see that the balance of power has shifted. Zvi is no longer so sure footed and Hannah has meanwhile gained in confidence and brightened.

But will they be able to breach religious differences and the dark seam of mistrust that has characterised their relationship? You keep hoping.

Tahor brings luminosity to her portrayal of Hannah, beautiful through her passionate beliefs and certainty of faith. Dowds inhabits the complex Zvi.

Both actors take on mild Israeli accents, but Dowds’s voice is sometimes lost within the accent and is indistinct at times. Both successfully draw you into their worlds and their dilemmas. I couldn’t help feeling that the interval was superfluous. The second half is distinctly shorter and I’m sure that we could have held out as an audience. The lack of a break would in this case serve to keep you engrossed.

A jarring element in the production is the use of lights, which suddenly brighten to indicate moments passing. I thought that this device was unnecessary. Darkening the stage for these moments passing would have felt more natural.

This is a story that stays with you long after the rather abrupt, yet open-ended final scene. You will draw your own conclusions as Hannah exits the stage – perhaps that religious differences cannot conquer all, or that two people cannot cross the divide of their own personalities, or something else entirely.

That’s the beauty and strength of Hard Love, which is a play that makes you question your own assumptions about the nature of love.


(Published in The Sunday Independent July 20 2008)