Writer: Mufaro Makubika, based on the book by NoViolet Bulawayo
Director: Monique Touko
Released in 2013, NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names was the first work by an African writer to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
The opening chapters of the novel, which themselves grew from Bulawayo’s prize-winning short story Hitting Budapest, concern life in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe through the eyes of a small group of pre-teen children. Mufaro Makubika’s adaptation makes this section the entirety of Act I, following Lukwesa Mwamba’s precocious 10-year-old Darling who at home must tend to a father sick with HIV, but who would much rather go out and play with her group of friends.
As the group of children bicker and banter, the backdrop of poverty, violence and political suppression is seen through innocent eyes. The group plot to steal guavas from the affluent Budapest neighbourhood; when NGO workers arrive with T-shirts and toy guns, the children smile and laugh for the endless cameras, aware that a good performance will garner them the best gifts.
Reality kicks through in more harrowing ways, from the group’s discovery of a dead woman hanging from a tree to the group’s struggle to understand how the oldest of their number – 11-year-old Chipo (Anashe Danai) – can be pregnant. A discussion of whether Chipo’s grandfather put the baby in his granddaughter’s belly derails into an attempt to role-play as doctors from the TV series ER, with the children finding nearby implements – stones, a rusty coat hanger – to fill in for medical implements.
The threat that great (though unintentional) harm might come to Chipo provides the biggest tension in the play’s first act, which otherwise is a little more freewheeling and less metaphorical than the novel. It is only when Darling is shipped off to live with her aunt Fostalina (Princess Khumalo) in America that the play really gets underway.
That this transition occurs between Acts I and II make the evening feel not like a single play, but more like a diptych. Darling’s travails as an African teenager, juggling to conform to an idea of what it means to be American while still retaining one’s heritage, feel a million miles away from her earlier playground games.
And while that difference is part of the point of Bulawayo’s novel, there’s an imbalance in how they’re presented here. That detracts from the rich complexities of the storytelling in Act II. Makubika astutely concentrates on the family dynamics at play, with each family member struggling with their identity in different ways. Especially engaging is a performance by Kalungi Ssebandeke as Tshsaka Zulu, a geriatric Zimbabwean at the care home at which Fostalina works. As his dementia increases, his regression to playing the tribal warrior of his ancestors is at once powerful and sad.
Occasional calls home, and the conflicted feelings Darling has about returning to Zimbabwe – having overstayed her visitor’s visa, going back would mean she could never return to America – tie the two disparate strands of the play together. But ultimately, this feels like an evening of high-quality related works rather than a cohesive whole.
Continues until 6 May.
