Identity and labels explored on stage
JOBURG - Playwright and director Penelope Youngleson's Expectant will offer Market Theatre audiences a contemporary coming of age story that explores racial and national identity.
Playwright and director Penelope Youngleson’s Expectant will offer Market Theatre audiences a contemporary coming of age story that explores racial and national identity.
Starring Rebecca Makin-Taylor, the sobering yet darkly funny story is told against the backdrop of the 400-year colonial history of young, white, English-speaking South Africans.
The theatre’s Robert Motseko said Youngleson’s play considered how this demographic’s “identity revolves and dissolves around what it means to be ‘from this country'”.
“Posed as the late night conversation-stains of a young woman who finds out she’s pregnant and isn’t sure she can stomach having another version of her own uncertainties materialise in front of her, Expectant address the fault lines in our country’s creolized culture with a dark sense of humour and sobering interpretation of the ‘new’ South Africa,” he said.
“A country where we only know who we are if we can label who everyone else is.”
The play pokes fun at the “pastel-flavoured placebos we swallow every morning over breakfast” through Makin-Taylor’s sensitively crafted, alluring and alarming performance.
The production also features soundscapes and a score by Joanie and Ben Ludik.
Expectant was a 2013 National Arts Festival Standard Bank Ovation award winner, and has played to audiences in Cape Town and Stellenbosch.
It also formed part of last year’s Afrovibes Festival in Amsterdam, and was invited to the 2012 African Theatre Association Conference as a practise-as-research piece, and formed part of the Afrovibes Festival.
Expectant will run at the Market Theatre, corner of Bree and Miriam Makeba streets, Newtown, until 2 February.
Details: 011 832 1641; www.markettheatre.co.za
