BWW Reviews: ASHES Offers a Glimpse of the Kindling and a Glance at the Flames of Systemic Homophobia in South Africa

Watching a new production by the Rust Co-operative, the two-year-old theatre company co-founded by Philip Rademeyer and Penny Youngleson, comes with the knowledge that the audience will be presented with a piece of theatre that, one the one hand, aims to offer a powerful emotional experience and, on the other, grapples with the socio-political milieu of contemporary life in the South African and global communities. Like THE VIEW and SIEMBAMBA, ASHES aims to open up grand narrative ideologies and behaviours that exist in some kind of tension with the underlying and resultant mores of those ideologies. Where ASHES diverges from its predecessors is in its hesitance to deconstruct the dark secrets it exposes about our accepted reality, which ultimately leaves the audience with no more agency than it had prior to seeing the play.

ASHES deals with the story of a young man who has moved from a small town to a buzzing metropolis. In the city, he meets a man and falls in love. The two live together in an idyllic bubble that seems somehow disconnected from the rest of the world, barring letters that connect the young man's partner with his parents. These letters open a channel of memory, through which the young man's relationship with his mother and father is explored. Structured as a triptych, ASHES then goes on to explore a cataclysmic act of violence that shatters the characters' lives, as well as the aftermath of the event.

Inspired by a series of real-life events, writer-director Rademeyer dives into the murky waters of systemic homophobia, coming up with the kind of story that is usually suppressed by news media, but which often gains currency in social media. Stories like the one told in ASHES easily inspire outrage in the setting of Facebook or Twitter, but that outrage tends to be armchair-bound. Truly, it is not change that society seeks, but opportunities for the affirmation that expressing moral outrage provides. In a function of image management, narcissism parades as empathy.

It is in negotiating that divide, the gap between our humanity and our performance of humanity, that the Rust Co-operative has found its greatest successes. But ASHES is not quite there yet. The play remains trapped in the domain of narrative. Stories are told and retold, deconstructed and reconstructed, but the ideas at the foundation of the narrative remain intact. Although Rademeyer considers carefully the insidious nature of systemic homophobia within the domestic environment, when ASHES begins to deal with the perpetrators of excessively violent attacks against members of the LGBT community in South Africa, the play settles into a straightforward villain-victim paradigm. If Rademeyer wants to chip away at the scourge of systemic homophobia, then that is the model he needs to explode.

The six characters in ASHES are brought to life by Shaun Gabriël Smith and Stefan Erasmus. The performances draw the audience in, negotiating well the politics of playing multiple roles representing a range of gender identities, even though the play tends to remain rooted within the traditionally accepted Western gender binary.

Smith plays the young man, his mother and the perpetrator of the violent act around which ASHES revolves, embracing the poeticism of Rademeyer's writing with his playful and resonant reading of the roles. As the lover, the young man's father and a witness to the crime, Erasmus delivers compelling work, investing the archetypal characters with captivating individual mannerisms.

The design of the play makes use of a few simple furniture pieces, knitted up in stranded wool, and almost invisible trails of ash, a detail more likely noticed by the audience as they move to and from the auditorium rather than from their seats. The use of the knitted up stage furniture works particularly well in creating a sense of domesticity as well as an attitude towards the protective bubble that people create with domestic activity; towards the end of the play when the ash becomes more prominent, a damning irony about its (in)efficacy is created.

Sound plays an important role in ASHES, with the first of the three sequences entirely underscored by gentle underscoring that lulls the audience into the safe(r) spaces created at the top of the play. In contrast, the second part of the play is starkly silent, while the third sequence breaks that silence with the repeated ringing of an unanswered phone. Whether the opening underscoring becomes overly hypnotic or not can be debated, but the phone, intended to be jarring, becomes too invasive, overpowering the words being spoken on stage. A more careful balance of the auditory environment needs to be negotiated here.

As earlier Rust Co-Operative plays have done, ASHES sets out to instigate both personal and political engagement in the audience. The play will connect quite powerfully with many of the audience members who see the play in its current short run at the Galloway Theatre, but catharsis trumps agency in the piece, which probably will not shift many people's perceptions around homophobia in South Africa. ASHES gives the audience a glimpse of the kindling and a glance at the flames of this systemic and sinister hostility, openly showing only what may already evident to us, the ashes. Rademeyer needs to find the autoignition point that sets ablaze the ideas he has chosen to explore in the play, a fire that will burn in our hearts and minds until we extinguish it by changing the world around us.

ASHES runs at the Galloway Theatre until 8 November. Tickets cost R60-R80 and can be booked through the Waterfront Theatre School website.

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