MOTHER TO MOTHER

Post-Grahamstown: July 12, 2012 – Review by Sifiso Sikhakhane

Ending off the festival for me was Freevoice Productions’ Mother to Mother which is another production I had been longing to see, but then again I quickly reminded myself to eliminate all the high hopes I had, especially after the previous night’s disappointment of Little Foot.

Mother to Mother is a story about forgiveness and reconciliation based on the tragic killing of Amy Biehl, a white American graduate of Stanford University and an anti-apartheid activist who was killed by a black mob in 1993 while driving a friend home to the township of Gugulethu.

I found this story deeply moving and at times difficult to stomach. Even though I never experienced apartheid and only got to learn about it in history lessons and stories which are still being recited by our folks in this very day and age, I did find the message to be quite current, addressing many of the issues one still experiences on a daily basis.

As a mother, how do you make sense of your son’s actions if you were to discover that he is now a murderer? Unfortunately that is the question that haunts many parents out there today and if you got the chance to see Mother to Mother, then you got the chance to be in one of those many parents’ shoes by experiencing the struggle they undergo with the help of Janice Honeyman’s direction and Thembi Mtshali-Jones who proved her brilliance onstage by making the story come alive through the multiple characters she portrayed.

As much as I would love to say all was hunky dory, I must make mention that I did feel as if the performance was just a tad long. I sometimes felt as if the piece remained in a monotone, but then again that is just my opinion and it does not dispute the fact that I enjoyed the performance.

Mother to Mother was presented at the 2012 National Arts Festival Main programme by Freevoice Productions in association with the National Arts Festival. – Sifiso Sikhakhane