(Nieke Lombard & Lesoko Seabe. Pic by Polle Willemsen)
(Review from the Hilton Arts Festival from Raymond
Perrier)
Drama helps us extend a particular experience to the general
and thus draw parallels from the general back to our own particular experience.
The experience of being a mother or being mothered is both
the most general and the most particular.
Each one of us has had a mother and many will be mothers. But in some
particular cases, the person we feel closest to as mother may not the woman in
whose womb we were carried. And in others, circumstances might mean that the
owner of the womb is not able to be as close to her child as a mother should
be. Phillip Rademeyer’s Siembamba
explores a particular example of this and thus poses more general questions
about South Africa.
Nieke Lombard plays the Afrikaans girl who grows up closer
to her black nanny than she does to her own mother; Lesoko Seabe, the African
domestic worker who has no choice but to be closer to the white girl she is
bringing up than she does to her own children. This particular racially-coded
story has, of course, been played out in so many South African families and
causes us again to consider how we claim and deny identity.
Part of the magic of the play is that the two characters
share a lot of their feelings in heavily-accented English which is clearly not
the first language (dare I say, ‘mother tongue’) of either character. The
English language distances them from their true selves while ironically being
the medium that allows us as the audience to connect with them (especially if,
like me, you could only enjoy the poetry but not the full meaning of the parts
in Afrikaans and vernacular).
The two actresses gave heartfelt performances, full of the
tensions of love and resentment that had grown up between the two
characters. I am afraid I was a bit less
convinced when the nanny also became the Earth Mother and so tried to take the
experience to the cosmological level.
It is sad and shocking to see how one girl’s relationship
with her mother and another mother’s relationship with her children have been
turned upside down by the pragmatism of nannying. At one level, both sides
benefit; at another both are profoundly wounded by it. It was even more
shocking to step out of the Memorial Hall at Hilton College and notice quite
how many white families were out for the afternoon with their black nannies
pushing the prams. I wonder how many of
them really thought through the social implications of this economic
arrangement. – Raymond Perrier
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