(Caitlin
Kilburn and Clinton Small)
World premiere proved Durban PANSA/NLDTF
judges made an excellent choice. (Review by Caroline Smart)
Craig Eisenstein’s Your Hand in My Pocket opened this evening at Catalina Theatre. The
script gained top honours for the
national finals of the PANSA/NLDTF Festival of Reading of New Writing in June and
tonight’s world premiere of the play itself proved the judges’ decision to be an
excellent choice.
In an interview with Latoya Newman in the
Daily News (October 30), Eisenstein states: “The reconciliation of
history and past hurts as a way to validate and vindicate this core, powerful
intangibility that we call love, for me, is certainly an aspect that I’m quite
fond of.”
At the outset, Your Hand in My Pocket seems a fairly
innocuous love story of two people who
meet on a bench in the park. She is Norah played by Caitlin Kilburn and he is Tomithy
– there’s a reason for his name being spelt this way! – played by Clinton Small.
Her life is law and his is … well, this is revealed later! Attendant pigeons
pester Norah for scraps from her lunchtime sandwiches but she ignores them.
As he sets out to woo her with his undeniable
charm, Tomithy tries to find the person beneath the defences. He encourages her
to look beyond the obvious and enter his world of make-believe. He teases her
about her name – the “No” being more prominent than the “Rah” and urges her to “think
like a new, better, you”. She warms to his charisma, responds to his humour and
willingly enters his fantasy of identifying the country of origin of the
passers-by. She even allows the pigeons a few scraps from her lunch.
In a meeting at the supermarket, Tomithy
gives his highly amusing take on packing food: packed from the supplier,
unpacked at the supermarket, packed onto the shelves, unpacked by the customer
and packed again at the tills, only to be unpacked by the consumer back home!
However, there is a hidden agenda to this
relationship. As it develops, it moves into darker levels of child abuse and the
psychological damage to both abuser and abused.
This is a sensitive subject to handle effectively in the context of
drama but director Will le Cordeur has taken Eisenstein’s fine-tuned script and
skilfully and carefully explored the nuances as well as the humour. This makes
the production highly watchable and heartwarming.
Small and Kilburn put in excellent performances creating two credible
and identifiable characters with a history they would rather hide. They are
supported by Mpumy Ndlovu
who appears as a cheerful supermarket till-point cashier.
The effectively managed set is simple, using a number of clean-cut furniture
pieces, all in stark white. A garden bench morphs into a supermarket freezer
unit or a settee while other pieces make up the cashier’s till counter. As the
relationship is based on the meetings in the park there is a nice touch with a
number of origami pigeons flying overhead, also in stark white.
It is such a pity that in dramas like these the
extractor fan noise forces actors to project unnecessarily and there were times
when Kilburn was inaudible especially in some critical sections.
Apart from being a fine dramatic piece, the
play carries a strong message and resounds on many levels. It’s a must-see!
Your
Hand in My Pocket at 20h00 runs from November
8 to 18. Tickets R60 booked through the Catalina Theatre Box Office on 031 305
6889 or visit www.strictlytickets.com – Caroline Smart
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