AN APPRENTICESHIP WITH SORROW. Directed by Lwanda Sindaphi. Written and Performed by Sara Matchett and Nina Callaghan. At Theatre Arts in Cape Town.
MEGAN CHORITZ reviews
Beautiful. That was the only word I could get out of my mouth after witnessing this magical, moving and beautiful piece of live performance.
The stage is strewn with the detritus of human life. Plastic. Bones. Tires. Bottles. Stuff. It’s a lot. A circular image of lungs and a tree of life is projected on the back. The lighting is soft, warm, muted.
Sara and Nina come onto stage as Sara and Nina. There is something mundane, quaint, charming about their little interaction, but it is short lived. Suddenly we are breathed into a deep and ancient world mythology. This happens throughout; a fluid movement between conversations with dead parents, to ancient mythological parable, to the poetry of screams and cries, to the metaphysical search for meaning when we lose someone we love.
T.S Eliot makes an appearance in An Apprenticeship with Sorrow, and it feels so apt – this world of grief, and coming to ‘terms’, and questions and big thoughts is his world as much as it is ours, a world of sadness and confusion, and retreating, and bodies letting us down, and minds and hearts filled with misplaced shame, and longing. And witnessing. Witnessing.
When Nina spoke about her father as her father I cried remembering my father’s leaving. When Sara found her mother in her voice and whimsy I remembered my mother, and felt my place in my forever parentless world. Dementia is so sensitively coloured in by them. So articulately danced through. Because it is the place of leaving. The leaving of logic, memory, ability, independence, sovereignty.
And it is also ordinary. The memories. The laughing.
Honesty, joy and sadness and intention
The writing of An Apprenticeship with Sorrow is beautiful. It is intentional. Huge. Poetic. Visceral. Nina and Sara are writers, performers, deliverers of mystic message. The personal is political and the political is personal. Everything is everything. This line. This line. “Maybe imagination is not just seeing from more than one angle, but seeing from a different time, a different set of rules.”
The video and projection design by Nicola Pilkington is surprising. Simple, moving. Perfect. The sonic score, created by Mangaliso Ntekiso and Sara Matchett is wonderful, strange and perfect.
A final word on Lwanda Sindaphi’s direction. It is so sensitive, bold, clear and intuitive. Working with writer/performers is challenging yet he manages to bypass all the usual traps and pitfalls and Nina and Sara shine, with honesty, joy and sadness and intention.
This work is beautiful.
What: An Apprenticeship with Sorrow
Where and when: Theatre Arts from 3 to 6 July 2025
Tickets: Theatre Arts, Cape Town
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