Tshepang: The Third Testament

'Tshepang' means 'hope'. The play that bears her name leaves us questioning how we face our own culpabilities and complicity in a vastly unequal world where the vulnerable are chewed up and destroyed.

Lara Foot has redirected her powerful play as part of the Baxter Theatre season at Assembly. Set in small-town South Africa, the production emphasises the distances between those with a grasp on power and those left trampled, or—perhaps just as damagingly—overlooked. Expansive dusty village squares are conjured, and a macrocosm of social injustice is pinpointed through the microcosm of one woman's tragedy. Although the play is based on true events of a nine-month-old child's rape, we end up weeping for widespread and systemic abuses, not just this tiny culmination.

Sex, skin colour, youth and age. Poverty. A complex net of symptoms unwinds like a mess of fisherman's wire. Narrator Mncedisi Shabangu's familiar manner keeps the tone from becoming heavy, but devastation, when it comes, is all the more powerful for that. He holds the show with strength, charisma, and a storyteller's clarity of well-timed gesture, introducing us to the story's players through a well-blended mixture of the country's many tongues.

The mute female presence of Nonceba Constance Didi is no token either, holding all the playwright's accusation in a riveting stare of pain, ceaselessly scrubbing her hands to rawness, or catatonic with guilt.

On Gerhard Marx's whimsical set the world's gaze does nothing, as in history. Will we do better?