eShowe’s Kline makes his mark
He intends on focusing his research on drama and performance as a means of building resilience in -and perhaps therapy for - children in youth shelters.
ESHOWE-born Kline Smith has been living in Pietermaritzburg for the past seven years where he enjoys the city’s laid-back mood, strong sense of community and its rich history which reminds him of home.
He currently lectures journalism at Rosebank College in Durban and is also pursuing a Master’s degree at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg.
He intends on focusing his research on drama and performance as a means of building resilience in -and perhaps therapy for – children in youth shelters.
Mob Feel Smith recently published his first play, ‘Mob Feel’, which is set in the summer of 1952 against the backdrop of an extended period of gang violence and ethnic rivalry, fuelled by mob mentality, which devastated the township of Westbury in Johannesburg.
The tragic love story of Linga and Mapula, and their attempt to overcome an old ethnic rivalry stained with prejudice, violence and pain, is told through evocative storytelling.
No elaborate props, sets, lighting, costumes and frills are used.
It is simply four people with a guitar, a drum, an abundance of energy and a story that is hauntingly reminiscent of the atrocities committed recently in South Africa, most notably the devastating xenophobic attacks that flared up in parts of the country.
All the intrigue Like Shakespeare’s play with its rival families, the Montagues and Capulets, the heart of the conflict of the play lies in the mutual enmity of the Letebele (a Xhosa clan) and the Russians, whose members are Sotho.
Neither clan permits its members to engage with the other, but, like Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, Linga and Mapula (a son and daughter of these bitter rival factions) cannot deny their mutual feelings when their secret is exposed by Mapula’s brother.
When Mapula’s father is fatally wounded in a battle, her uncles decide to exact their revenge by inciting violence among the villagers.
Apt for our time Often when people are part of a group, they tend to experience a loss of self-awareness.
The people then seem to confer acceptability on some behaviours that would not otherwise be seen as such.
South Africa, now more than ever, faces the rapidly increasing incidences of violence and conflict inherited from a fractured past.
Lyrical and at times almost balletic, choreographed movements combine physical theatre with the age-old traditions of storytelling to relate this tragic story.
From baseless prejudice to community agitators and the related mob justice that is carried out, we experience the senselessness of it all. Copies of his play are available from Robin Malan – email info.junkets@iafrica. com.
Kline has won the Best Writer and Best Director awards in the 2012 National Arts Festival’s Student Theatre Programme and the Best Fringe Production award at the 2013 Musho! International Theatre Festival
