Kompoun, Theatre
Venue: Great Hall
Next performance: Sunday 29 June 19:00
Review
By Keith Bain, guest writer
Kompoun, deftly directed by Lee-Ann van Rooi, is hard-hitting, rough, raw and gritty in the best sense of the word. And it’s emotionally shattering.
It is a weighty show, adapted for the stage from Ronelda Kamfer’s novel which is something of a literary powerhouse, relentless and cutting. It examines various forms of trauma – family, childhood, generational – in an explicitly and distinctly South African context, conveyed through the observations, experiences and memories of cousins Nadia and Xavier (Xavie) McKinney. The show, despite the awfulness of some of the stories told, is gorgeously entertaining, very funny in places, and it’s fuelled by a wonderful sense of aliveness that’s generated by the two young actors, both bright-eyed and both gorgeous, who held me in their grip from start to finish.
These cousins arrive on stage in calf-length jeans and white Converses, along with plenty of attitude and Gloria Estefan’s “Conga Beat” playing like it’s the theme tune for their dance into battle. They’re on a mission to perform for us, and in so doing enact some kind of much-needed ritual of storytelling. They’re pretty hectic, too, and quite unapologetic.
They’re demand our attention, and prove themselves wholly worthy of it.
Part of the play’s appeal is the language. It’s written in Kaaps (or Afrikaaps), which feels so close to the bone, possesses a kind of inherent poetry and musicality, and is incredibly visual. It is also rough. There’s are lines like, “Net ’n lekker man kry ’n poes op ’n silwer skinkbord!” (only a good man gets pussy on a silver tray), which effectively sums up both the ribald humour and the honest, if callous, kinds of observations that these two young characters are capable of sharing.
Kamfer has said that she gave the novel young narrators because youth is generally that time in our lives before we begin to compromise, before life’s focus turns to selfish risk-avoidance. In other words, we can rely on Nadia and Xavie to be honest and open with us; they have seen a lot and know a lot, but have not shut down the possibility of change, of escape, of hope.
And they are resilient, determined to claim the freedom they crave.
Nadia, who is played by the wonderful Melissa de Vries, at one point states that the play is “an intervention”, a way of breaking the cycle. She and Xavie, played by another lovely actor, Angelo Bergh, are the grandchildren of the stammoeder (clan mother, matriarch, ancestress) Sylvia McKinney, whose power over ensuing generations has a kind of hyperbolic, almost inescapable quality, as though there is a genetic cause for trauma, that it’s something inherited by birth.
But Nadia and Xavie represent a generation that is fed up and well aware that there’s nothing magical or inherited about what the people in their family have had to endure. To break the curse, they have to confront the past, recognise and address its mistakes, and refuse to be part of it.
It’s not magic or spell-casting they’re busy with, though, but storytelling, something ancient that humans have done since we first gathered around fires to collectively share our experiences. By telling these stories, Xavie and Nadia are determined to stop the “generational curses” that have afflicted the McKinney clan.
And thus the play is a type of therapy, too – by sharing the burden of the past with the audience, Xavie and Nadia can perhaps empower us all to move forward, potentially unburdened. It is theatre as a kind of cleansing, breaking free, healing, and renewal.
Despite the hard, sore realities it reveals, and the wounds it deals with by unrelentingly ripping the plaster off, Kompoun really does feels like an intervention. It feels like a light shone in the darkness, and it feels precisely like the kind of theatre we need to help lift curses inherited from the past. The clue is in a line that struck me hard: “Your father is buried and now we can breathe. Now you may live.” Amen to that.
• Find the full review at https://keithcapetown.substack.com/
