Review: Mafikeng Road By Tamani Chithambo, Victoria Girls’ High School, Grahamstown My heart dropped as I walked into St Andrew’s Centenary Hall.
It wasn’t just because the hall was filling up quickly and I was likely to get a dreaded seat at the back on the day, of all days, when I had forgotten my glasses.
Review: Mafikeng Road By Tamani Chithambo, Victoria Girls’ High School, Grahamstown My heart dropped as I walked into St Andrew’s Centenary Hall.
It wasn’t just because the hall was filling up quickly and I was likely to get a dreaded seat at the back on the day, of all days, when I had forgotten my glasses.
Worse, the "stage" was devoid of any props, which just reinforced my feeling that this production would be tedious. I had walked into that hall with low expectations. I had done the very thing this festival and life teaches you not to do: judge a book by its cover.
Then I thought: this director must be really confident if she thinks that a hall full of teenagers would watch a prop-less plot unfold for an hour; we are the generation that has the attention span of goldfish, after all.
Confident is right. The last thing I expected was a ROFL (rolling-on-floor-laughing) dynamic performance that left tears on my face long after the production was done with.
Physical theatre isn’t really my thing, but the performance duo of Andrew Laubscher and Matthew Lewis made TV comedy look like a waste of money.
Laubscher and Lewis aptly created an action-packed physical theatre performance that left the audience laughing as if they were watching the best stand-up comedian in South Africa.
If those two could whip through three stories by the talented South African writer Herman Charles Bosman in an hour, without any set, then surely commercial television could try to do the same – and actually exercise our brains in the time being.
There were undoubtedly people in that hall who don’t like to read. But we all share something in common – excellent visual literacy.
We could see the swift character changes that were taking place, and the thought bubbles being drawn in, as clear as if it were a comic strip.
We followed the "finger acting" like Hansel and Gretel followed the trail breadcrumbs home. We waltzed off like children after the Pied Piper of Hamelin, as the actors made music with their mouths.
Mafeking Road is a good example of how a stage production doesn’t need a large cast or elaborate set to be brought to life.
It’s as simple as two guys doing some great acting – maybe not as simple as making lemonade… but you get the idea. No wonder it won an Ovation Award, and it will definitely be getting a rating of 10 on my response sheet to the Schools Festival!
This review is a product of one of the workshops at the recent Standard Bank National Schools Festival, Be an Arts Journalist!, where pupils were encouraged to write short reviews, personal reflections and general festival observations.
