Mandla Rae has a lot to process. There is the evangelical upbringing under the strictures of the Seventh-day Adventists. The estrangement from parents and being raised by a grandmother. The childhood flight to the UK as a refugee from Zimbabwe. The physical abuse inflicted by a friend of the family in Glasgow. Being raised as Bridget, a name so British it could be a symbol of colonialism. The change of name to Mandla, which translates as “power”, the rejection of all personal pronouns and the self-identification as “agender”.
With such a complex set of identities, Mandla is as British as a watermelon, a fruit that is familiar and delicious but whose provenance lies elsewhere. The minimalist stage is full of them. They are there for Mandla to stab, to prize open, to chop into pieces and try, in vain, to reconstruct. The performer sinks fingers into the flesh, squeezes out the juice and turns the pulp into makeup or, perhaps, blood cascading over ancient scars.
But the metaphor is hard to read. In a show with the look and sedentary pace of a live art installation, Mandla evokes these defining moments with an indirect poetic air that is impressionistic and vague. The elliptical approach makes it difficult for us to connect to the serious personal traumas at stake.
Religion features prominently. It begins with the Lord’s Prayer, as the performer sets the table with knives that could either be domestic implements or tools of violence. “I have risen from the dead,” Mandla says, politely dismissing the grandmother who denied the existence of dinosaurs because they do not appear in the Bible.
There are references to God’s absolute retribution on Sodom and Gomorrah and to the lifelong struggle between the twins Jacob and Esau in the Book of Genesis. “I don’t want God’s love,” the actor says. “I think it’s toxic.”
But these ideas are as fleeting as the story of a Home Office raid and the disturbing observation that “in order to survive we were taught to forget”. Mandla Rae has put a lifetime of damage into the play, but an aesthetic that is more poetic than dramatic, more private than shared, makes it hard to get as much out of it.
• At the Studio, Festival theatre, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
