Bridling, Theatre
Venue: Rhodes Box
Next performance: Friday 4 July 18:00
Review
By Keith Bain, guest writer
Silence and inaction are the torments at the heart of Bridling.
The terror of it struck me instantly. Only for a moment, but as the stage lights came up and we witnessed actor Buhle Ngaba on a chair placed on top of a table, facing the audience, her face trapped inside that mask-like contraption, the sense of physical and psychological torment was all too real.
The bridle – here an instrument of torture – is something akin to that terrible mask used to restrain the captured cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, in Silence of the Lambs, and not at all unlike masks used for silencing women in the television serialisation of The Handmaid’s Tale.
It seems untenable that such a device would even exist in any civilised reality. And yet these contraptions were once legion.
Rather than Ngaba’s character having a bit in her mouth so that she cannot speak, she is the play’s narrator. It is essentially her story, a monologue that is a coming-to-life of Nadia Davids’ award-winning short story, Bridling, about a young, early-in-her-career actress (it could, in some alternate reality, be Ngaba herself) who auditions for a role in a new performance devised by some hot-shot theatre director with a penchant for creating work that is disturbing and challenging.
In this case, his conceptual piece will require its cast of 12 female performers to enact three-dimensional living facsimiles of notable artworks. Each of the paintings selected for such enactment is of a woman and each is by a male artist, alluding in some way to a questionable male gaze.
Whether it’s because the woman being depicted is nude or scantily clad, or has been subjected to some sort of violence, what’s evoked is a sense of their having been objectified, victimised, brutalised, captured, trapped or imprisoned by the picture’s frame – and, presumably, by the artist responsible.
In Bridling, artistic genius is represented by the hypnotic dancer and actor Shaun Oelf, who plays a kind of ethereal representation of the rock-star theatre director whose artistic genius grants him permission to exercise control and power over his harem of performers.
We witness a complex power game play out, hearing the consequences – emotional, psychological, physical and metaphysical – for the women involved from Ngaba’s Narrator.
Each of the women performing the play-within-the-play must effectively submit to acts of self-torture and each of the tableaux will require the women featured in them to remain absolutely still and silent for the five-hour duration of each performance.
The director refers to it as “durational performance art.” Herein, he tells them again and again, lies the crux of the piece: its political significance, in other words, is the pain they must endure as they render themselves motionless, silent, and in a sense, absent.
This might sound like a formula for a show that’s very grim, perhaps too dark and shadowy, too lugubrious and menacing. And yet while those elements are all there, the playmaking brings just the right degree of buoyancy and lightness to ensure that – in spite of all the creepiness and under-the-surface horror – it’s charming and entertaining, too.
It is a fabulous play, in fact, so delicately and powerfully directed by Jay Pather who has imbued it with rich imagery, incredible dancing and such beautiful theatricality. It lifts you up, nourishes you, and it does so without allowing the weight and depth of the traumas it reveals to bring you down.
Davids has stated that one of the themes in the story is that of agency and another is “co-opted feminism.” She herself worked in theatre for at least 20 years and came to recognise some of the contradictions within that world, a place that can be so liberating and represent such freedom and outspokenness, and yet which – like most things – has a shadow side, a darker aspect. Darkness or shadow is brought to life also by Oelf’s whimsical representation of the theatre director who is accorded such power and whose ego borders on the satirical.
There is, however, a lightness, not only in the manner with which the mesmerising dancer floats so lightly and imperceptibly about the stage, hops onto tables and moves insect-like, birdlike, spirit-like from one position to the next, but also in a kind of breezy parodying of his character, whose menace is cleverly undercut by a ridiculous blonde wig, an exaggerated paunch and by both Oelf’s subtle comedy and his inescapable humanity.
As Ngaba’s Narrator recalls the sequence of events surrounding the show, Oelf’s narcissistic director dances in order to evoke an array of emotions. At some point he is unmasked as Ngaba pulls off his pants, snatches away his fat suit and disappears the wig. Near-naked, he stands before us, simply another human.
For the Narrator, however, there is a kind of Stockholm syndrome inability to escape the trap that is her role in this genius director’s morbidly inactive, silent non-play. She has chosen to be in this harrowing performance and now it is has become her fate, her prison.
In a particular, gut-wrenching moment, my heart broke. It was a reminder that the pernicious silencing and censoring and subjugation of women does not and never has required something physical, such as a scold’s bridle, to be enforced. We have simply to step into a gallery or look around the world to see who holds most of the power. The evidence is everywhere, even in theatres, where one imagines that freedom is being performed.
What Bridling does with such force and such poetry is give a voice to those who have, throughout history, endured countless mechanisms of silence.
Read the review in full at https://keithcapetown.substack.com/
