Nothing can quite prepare you for what happens on stage upstairs at the Alexander Bar. The blurb for Penny Youngleson’s Expectant describes it as “a coming of age story told against the backdrop of a 400 year colonial history of young, white, English speaking South Africans; and how their identity resolves and dissolves around what it means to be ‘from this country’”. Her description gives the production a good foundation and a solid perspective, but the house built on this foundation is rickety and filled with ghosts.
Expectant is a monologue, performed flawlessly by Rebecca Makin-Taylor. The complete ownership she has of the script and the ease and fluidity with which Makin-Taylor performs had me convinced for the longest time that the words had been born in her own head. She performs a woman trapped by the bourgeoisie lifestyle of old moneyed boredom manifested as contrived superiority. A woman pregnant by mistake and loathsome of the idea of growing another failed human being inside her. A woman maladjusted to normal society, an insomniac writer both pleased and alienated by her differentness, someone’s lover on a ship to nowhere remembering a better past and dreaming of better days.
Youngleson’s script is poetry in motion. Smooth and staccato words pour out of Makin-Taylor like a meth-addict’s disconnected ramblings as she recites names and dates and gives a whirlwind tour of South African colonial history. Intelligent insights into the political status of Cape Town and of South Africa are interspersed with painfully introspective moments and melancholy remembrances of love gone sour. Youngleson wrote her lead as a fatalistic femme broken into fragments and, like a child fiddling with a radio dial, the play tunes in to these different shards of womanhood for a fraction of time before they are once again lost in the ether.
This piece of theatre feels more like performance art than a play. The wonderful venue – Upstairs at the Alexander bar – is small and intimate, throwing the audience straight into the story – a deeply personal and often uncomfortable experience with this particular show. Sound designers Joanie and Ben Ludik have chosen a perfectly fitting score which adds to the eeriness and supports the intensity of Makin-Taylor’s performance throughout. Even the simple yet symbolic set design and the costume echo an element of decadence and ruin, all contributing to the depth of this individual psycho-biography.
Master wordsmith Youngleson points out that we die as we believe we lived, and that everyone in any given moment is experiencing the now from a point of collective experience. Expectant touches on a lot of relevant topics. It analyses and asks rhetorical questions about authenticity, society, self-love, acceptance, classism and more, all while dancing on the thin line between genius and insanity. It digs deep into the psyche and the demons inhabiting the non-stop downhill rollercoaster-ride emotions of an unstable character. This performance is well deserving of the Standard Bank Ovation Award it received at the 2013 National Arts Festival but be warned: expect drama. Expectant is brilliant, but it’s not easy to watch.
Marilu Snyders
Expectant runs at Alexander Upstairs 15 – 24 August, and then at Theatre Arts Admin Collective 1 – 3 September 2013. Details here.
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