SILLAGE. Written and directed by Penny Youngleson. With Rebecca Makin-Taylor and Michele Belknap.
REVIEW: Tracey Saunders
The actors are already on the stage as you enter the theatre. Belknap and Makin-Taylor engage in choreography of stillness, repeating synchronised gestures, but this is merely motion with no movement. It sets the pace of the play as the relationship between a mother and her daughter stutters through the process of downsizing and moving a home. The connection between the two of them is implied and yet it is never quite fulfilled. Their attempts to move towards each other, to establish a meaningful connection is just off kilter, a misheard note, a misspoken truth and as they pass each other, never making eye contact they are loosely bound but not held.
More than the remnants of an umbilical chord are necessary to stitch the matriarchal relationship together and as they attempt to weave their very separate lives together we are allowed an intimate glimpse in to the delicate balance between holding your child tightly and gently letting them go.
The palette is white – two white women dressed in white lace dresses navigating two white chairs alongside a long white table. Even their pallor seems a whiter shade of pale and their unbearable lightness of being forms part of their emotionally charged exchanges. The daughter is aware of her whiteness, its role in a country where poverty is rampant and inequality is still evident and racially constructed. Her mother wants to look beyond the past and hankers after that misguided notion of a rainbow nation. The politics of omission weigh heavily on her and her denial of complicity is as vehement as her daughter’s slight obsession with current affairs. The adage of the personal being political is implicit in their interchanges and while the fiercely passionate political beliefs expressed seem slightly polemical they are an intrinsic part of their faltering relationship.
The accumulated detritus of a middle class suburban life
The conversation between the pair as they pack up the accumulated detritus of a middle class suburban life, replete with tennis rackets, skeins of wool and faded postcards is a duet of misunderstanding that despite itself is deeply embedded in love. The expectations of a woman’s role in the world, what she should achieve and by when are experienced very differently by the two women, or are they? In the discovery of mementos of her mother’s youth, the daughter finds glimpses of a woman with as dreams as big as her own. There are brief moments of connection when the synapses of empathy are stirred as she reveals a woman who was just that, a woman before she became a mother.
At the heart of this exceptional piece of work is a beautifully crafted script which has been nominated in the category for the Best New South African Script at the 52nd Fleur Du Cap Theatre Awards. The writing establishes two characters with a shared past, negotiating an emotionally fraught present towards an uncertain future. Threaded through the tragedy is a thread of dark humour, a hallmark of Youngleson’s writing. In Nat, Expectant and Full Stops on Your Face she created complex female characters with more than enough reason to wallow in the depths of despair.
A raft of humour
She builds them all a raft of humour though, a dry and dark ability to laugh at the banal evil of sexism, homophobia, racism on which they navigate the anger and pain of their lives. So too in Sillage, the self deprecating humour bemoaning the insidious creep of rampant consumerism and a society more concerned with the size of your bank account then the depth of your heart. Belknap is perfectly cast and wears the essence of a life lived and moments lost like another skin. With just one withering look she conveys her extreme distaste at some of her daughter’s choices and in a heartbeat you watch her melt with the memory of her early days of motherhood.
So vivid are her recollections that along with the scent of expensive French perfume the whiff of powdered baby nappies wafts across the stage for a brief moment. Since the production premiered last year Makin-Taylor has sunk in to this role with an easy effortlessness. Her mannerisms, her musings at her mother’s life and her misplaced sense of the lack of her own exceptionalism are conveyed with a poignancy that is visceral.
As the memory of scent recalls fields of flowers, a graveyard of petals, Youngleson evokes other women, other lives and moments and memories lost are recalled with an aching clarity. Sillage will linger with you with the same sweet ache as the scent of the young woman’s grandmother’s perfume Quelques Fleurs (Some Flowers) does.
Where and when: Alexander Upstairs until 25 February
Book: Alexander Upstairs
WS
