Ira wishes he had more time for 43things
I see that I never did come back to write about Kazuko Hohki’s My Husband Is A Spaceman, which I mentioned going to see in my last entry on this goal, two years ago (!) I remember it to be great! But it was so long ago, that I remember little about it. I still have the cd I bought from the show, of the music from it, somewhere. That’s one problem with theatre – there’s no permanent record of it (unless, I guess, it becomes famous). Perhaps that makes it more special for some people, but it saddens me that I cannot relive a show – and if I missed the run of a play, I may never be able to see it. Considering the effort and love people put into making theatre… it seems such a shame.
Anyway. I hadn’t marked this goal completed because My Husband Is A Spaceman was really a solo show (accompanied by a musician) – and I wasn’t sure if a solo show was considered a play. But the one I saw last week definitely was.
I went to see Yours Abundantly, From Zimbabwe. It was a good experience – though I had mixed feelings about the play. The stage was beautiful – it’s fascinating for me to see how stage designers work with the limitations of a stage and push it to its limits for the story, and this one was an incline of beautiful wooden floorboards, with a circular platform in the centre cut out and level, like the photo here. The part of the story from Zimbabwe took place on the incline, while the scenes with the main character and her daughter in England happened in the middle. With some lighting and sound recordings, the scenes were set beautifully.
I had more of a problem with the play itself, which was about a well-off, middle-aged white woman from England, Nell Porter, who, after a trip to Zimbabwe, begins corresponding with a young Zimbabwean boy she met there, helping with his school fees, and ends up corresponding with the headmaster of his school and his wife and other orphans there. As she gets more and more news of hardships and requests for money, she feels overwhelmed and starts doubting her own motivation for helping – with her cynical daughter suggesting to her that she was using the orphans to deal with her own mid-life crisis.
I had two problems with the play: the first was that while the Zimbabweans’ letters to Nell Porter were warm, and talked about what the orphans were up to and how the children were progressing in school and in their struggles with life in Zimbabwe, the letters were also, at least for most of the way through the play, full of unreserved requests for money. It’s the lack of reservation that bothers me – I don’t remember any of the letters ever apologising or feeling embarrassed for asking Porter for money again. While their desperate situation does not leave much room for polite reservation, I would’ve thought there would’ve been more dignified reluctance to ask for money from the headmaster and his wife, the adults, at least. The letters were asking for money in language that was, as one review put it, “comically, sycophantically excessive” – and while that is at least partly a result of mistranslation in the Zimbabweans’ use of a second language, I feel it robs the Zimbabweans in the story of some of their dignity. So much so that for much of the story, I was not sure if Porter was going to end up finding out that it was a scam after all.
The interesting thing is that the play was based on the playwright Gillian Plowman’s own similar experience of corresponding with a group of young orphans from Zimbabwe – it leaves you wondering how much was fiction, and how much actually happened with her. Which brings me to my second problem with the play – the character Nell Porter’s fight and subsequent reconciliation with her daughter felt tacked on, unrealistic, and ultimately took away somewhat from what was happening in Zimbabwe. It was certainly an interesting theme – whether Westerners sending money to, say, Zimbabwe, is sometimes less about helping, than filling the emptiness in their own lives, or making themselves feel better. The play certainly makes the case (though I’m not sure if it was the playwright’s intention) that ultimately it doesn’t matter – help is help, and whether your intention is pure or if you’re just making yourself feel better in the process, it’s pretty much the same to those that need it. But, the character of the cynical daughter that felt unloved by her mother while her mother spent her attention and money putting out fires for Zimbabwean orphans just didn’t quite ring true for me – at least, not how it was written. The dialogue towards the end of their reconciliation was jarring in how unrealistic it seemed. I think that part of the story could have been done better, to get us to really sympathise with Nell Porter and her daughter. In the end, I didn’t feel I did.
Still, I’m glad I went to see it. I like theatre, and I’ll definitely be seeing more of it. It’s another form of storytelling that fascinates me. :)
