It’s appropriate that Johannesburg’s Market Theatre begins its five-city English tour in Hull, the UK’s City of Culture 2017. Founded in 1976, the company, as its website says, “challenged the apartheid regime, armed with little more than the conviction that culture can change society”.
Sibongeleni James Ngcobo, who has been the company’s artistic director for the past four years, aims to redefine the theatre in the light of the post-1994 realities. As he writes in the programme: “South Africa has gone through a complete metamorphosis” and the Market Theatre is changing, too, to operate in a “universal space”.
The Suitcase, as developed by Ngcobo from a short story by Es’kia Mphahlele (1919-2008), brings out the universal aspects of a particular situation. Timi and Namhla are a young couple whose parents disapprove of their marriage (he is Zulu and she is Xhosa). They leave their village for the big city, carrying scant savings, few possessions and bright dreams of a new life. In the 1950s, racial discrimination stacks the odds against them.
On a wooden pallet in the centre of the stage stand a table, chair and a shelf. To one side of the pallet is a small wooden bench; to the other, a dustbin. The sprawling, hostile city that surrounds this one-room hub is brought to people-filled life by two “storytellers”, Molatlhegi Desmond Dube and Nhlanhla John Lata. Daily humiliation and rejection etch deeper into Timi’s every gesture, tellingly executed by Siyabonga Caswell Thwala. His route through the city circles the little room where (the excellent) Masasa Lindiwe Mbangeni’s Namhla tries to keep hope alive. His despair leads him to an irrevocable mistake.
Hugh Masekela’s bright, period-style jazz, shaded with blues and echoes of hymns (a stunning live vocal trio and guitarist), amplifies the story’s scope, as do the sharply detailed performances, full of humour and deep humanity. Apartheid has gone, but lives of people the world over are still blighted by prejudice and injustice.
