Written and performed by Pamela Gien, this one-woman show about South Africa arrives at the Cottesloe garlanded with Off-Broadway awards. And, although I have reservations about both form and content, there is no denying the show's narrative power or Gien's astonishing skill in playing some 27 different characters.
The evening starts with a girl on a swing. This is six-year-old Lizzie, daughter of a liberal Jewish doctor and Catholic mother, growing up in a Johannesburg suburb in the early years of apartheid. The wide-eyed Lizzie is passionately attached to a black servant. When the servant herself has a daughter, the family shelters the child in defiance of government "pass" laws. What follows is a compelling story of the ties that transcend race and of the contrasting fortunes of two children: Lizzie passes through her student activist phase to become an American exile, while her black playmate narrowly escapes infant death only to become involved in teenage confrontations with riot police.
Gien, to her credit, gives us a wide-angled vision of Jo'burg life. Lizzie's open-spirited family are sharply contrasted with their appalling Afrikaner neighbours. And, in one thrilling sequence, Gien vividly evokes the fear felt even by white liberals at venturing into a township by night in the early 1960s. Using her tall, lean body with balletic freedom, Gien also has the ability to switch character in a second, moving from the skipping, agile Lizzie to her bustling, upright father or her slow-gaited nurse weighed down by care.
But the show's mix of fact and fiction troubles me. We know, from the programme, that one of the main incidents in the story is true - there really was a fatal attack on Gien's grandparents' farm at Clova by freedom-fighters from across the Rhodesian border. But we have no means of knowing whether it is equally true that this prompted Lizzie's beloved black nurse to quit the family because "we carry the sins of our brothers". If fact, it is remarkable. If fiction, it is part of what I see in the story as a tendency to sentimentalise the black servants. It is as if their role in life is to appease, and even buttress, the white liberal conscience while naturally continuing to do all the dirty work.
The piece is excellently acted by Gien, ingeniously directed by Larry Moss and boasts an evocative sound design, full of frogs and crickets, from Tony Suraci. But I would be interested to know if black spectators feel, as I do, that behind its genuine celebration of race-transcending love lies a faint whiff of patronage.
Until April 3. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
