Miracle
The premise is intriguing enough: during the Great Depression a tired theatre company trudges across an unspecified western country. Five bedraggled actors, under the blustering leadership of Dante Du Pré (Tim Woodward in fruitiest form), roam from town to town and inflict their ramshackle staging of the 15th-century morality play Everyman on the locals. Life imitates art, though, when the mysterious Anna (Lynne Miller) enters their world bringing death in her wake.
A supernatural thriller? Maybe, but De Wet is ambiguous on the matter. She is decisive, though, in her unerring ear for banality. The dialogue (translated from the Afrikaans by the author and Stephen Stead) is knitted together with cliché, and plausible characterisation is the casualty. “What has become of the theatre?” booms Du Pré; “I’ve always been the main attraction” moans his leading lady. It clunks like that for two whole hours.
The cast is led by Susannah York, a great star of the sixties and still radiant. Her role as a faded acting diva is clearly inspired by Arkadina in The Seagull, but it is written without a shred of Chekhovian insight or truth. York is so much mightier than the role she plays, and it is sad to see this fine actress gnawing at such a barren script, frantically trying to extract some drop of nourishment from its pages.
A couple of good actor-musicians, Kate Colebrook and Christopher Dingli, do what they can with their two-dimensional roles, but when Du Pré declares “one’s pregnant, the other drinks like a fish”, that pretty well sums up what they have to work on.
Linnie Reedman directs energetically and works wonders with the tiny Basement space. She is culpable only in allowing her company, Ruby in the Dust, to host such a pointless play. We should applaud any organisation that supports new material, but this needs to be done with judgement and quality control. De Wet’s effort has nothing to say about the human condition, it offers no relevance to the world we inhabit, it is littered with solecisms and it barely passes muster as entertainment. If this play ever gets a second coming, ’twill be a miracle indeed.
– Mark Valencia
