From my seat in the Flipside Theatre I have a voyeuristic glimpse into a place seemingly closer to hell than heaven and the two people stuck in there. Only forgiveness will allow them to move on. But there’s no hurry… he has all of eternity to convince her.
The Catholics believe Purgatory to be a place where one is purified before departing to heaven. Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman interpreted this as a clinical, penitentiary-inspired space with a Big Brother presence in the form of camera surveillance and regular visits by psychologists. In his play Purgatorio he places two characters in this barren space, an unnamed Man and Woman, with the simple task of making peace with themselves, and each other. Well, not that simple considering the woman killed their two sons and his new woman and the man left her for said murdered woman.
I have heard it said that plays with fewer actors on stage are often the better choice in Cape Town. With Purgatorio this is definitely the case. Dawid Minaar’s almost asexual therapist is the perfect foil to Terry Norton’s crazed psych patient, and with these exceptionally well cast actors the stage is complete.
Purgatorio is one of the few plays of this nature that is accessible. While the highbrow theatre goer can enjoy analysing the play to shreds and raking through its rich tapestry of themes, for those who just want a good night out this play is utterly absorbing and, though challenging, it speaks to the soul as much as to the intellect.
Do not go see Purgatorio on a day where you have a lot to do. Clear your schedule for a few hours after the play. Once you leave the eerie Flipside theatre the impact of the play will still linger for some time. Let it.
Jana van Heerden
@woict_girl
Purgatorio runs at the Baxter’s Flipside Theatre 7 – 30 July 2011.
Quite agree. This production was another insult to the intelligent audience. Devoid of subtlety. Played for the obvious. Again, cape town in denial. I left before chewing my arm off at the third blackout. Total directorial incompetence.
I must disagree with Jana van Heerden’s review of Purgatorio. Just as a play about boredom shouldn’t itself be boring (Beckett knew this very well), so a play about purgatory shouldn’t leave an audience feeling an endless tedium. Unfortunately, Purgatorio does exactly that. The play demands, rather than earns, the audience’s empathy, and offers very little reason why we should care about a Medea-like figure, who murders her two children for revenge. We are not given much reason to care about Medea, and the endless discussion between her and the Jason-character often feels self-indulgent and heavy handed.
The play is also unclear on the central issues it is trying to explore – redemption, forgiveness and repentance. The Medea and Jason characters are at times ‘therapists’, and at times ‘patients’, as they adopt different roles in a purgatory dressed up as a psychiatric ward, and ‘bearing your soul’ is the metaphor that seems to be used to do the complicated work that a true exploration of grief, repentance and forgiveness would require. The question and answer sessions sound contrived, and the audience has no more understanding of the characters’ inner worlds by the end of the play than it did at the beginning.
The acting was mixed; Dawid Minaar was sympathetic and believable as Jason, but less convincing in the ‘therapist’ role, while I found Terry Norton over-acted much of the time – the director should rather have toned things down rather than trying to create a sense of the character’s ‘madness’ by histrionics on stage. Sometimes less is more. The actors weren’t helped by the script, which was wooden and plodding, and the bits of video scenes that were shown at times added little to either the narrative or the emotional development.
I found little to recommend the play; if the Baxter wants to put on a production that examines the themes of revenge, repentance, hatred, love and all the emotions in-between, it’d have done better to have put on a revival of “Medea” rather than this poor re-working of it. In the 2000 years since Euripides’ play, not much can beat it.