It’s been a long, hard journey. When actor Vumile Nomanyama walked onstage during the show’s first performance in Cape Town two years ago, white audience members marched out in protest of a black man’s playing Jesus. But “The Mysteries” was designed to bridge racial and economic divides by drawing on common cultural heritage. And slowly, it seems to be succeeding. “Our task is not only building a new company but building a new audience,” says director Mark Dornford-May. “Building a totally colorblind audience is going to take at least 20 years, but a mixed audience is a beginning.” Meanwhile the cast is creating a new vision of what black South Africans can achieve. “People like us, who go abroad, contribute a lot when we come back,” Nomanyama says. “We plow back the experience we get into our communities, so we can help upgrade standards.”
The project got underway in 1998, when South African arts patron Dick Enthoven asked Dornford-May, who directs a theater in one of London’s poorest boroughs, to form a company in Cape Town. Enthoven hoped to showcase South Africa’s indigenous talent and bring its fractured communities together, and Dornford-May jumped at the chance. He began recruiting through the country’s strong network of local choirs, which sent singers flocking to auditions. He didn’t look at resumes because “people didn’t have a past,” he says. “They’d had no opportunities to do anything.” Nearly 2,000 auditioned, “but a lot of people turned up simply because they wanted a job.” In the end, he selected about 40 actors–mostly black, along with a few white and mixed-race cast members.
Then Dornford-May had to settle on a show. He chose to adapt the medieval plays from his hometown of Chester because “Christianity’s a common thread,” he says. “The Chester Cycle,” as the plays are known, is the liveliest example of the genre, which dramatizes Bible stories from Adam and Eve to Christ’s resurrection. To reflect the multi-cultural cast the company translated the text into Afrikaans, Zulu and Xhosa, the main languages of South Africa, with a smattering of the original English text. Dornford-May brought the show first to his little local theater, Wilton’s Music Hall, last year, before taking it to the West End.
The cast’s experience of apartheid infuses the medieval stories with a contemporary edge. “It helps a lot that we had to go through that ordeal,” says Nomanyama. Dornford-May adds that among the performers “there’s an acute understanding of poverty [and] the idea that if a person is saying something different from the authorities, that becomes a problem. There’s an awareness that violence can break out unexpectedly. All this is because of apartheid.” In the show, Pontius Pilate is depicted as a British governor who interrogates Christ in English. Jesus, crucified in jeans, replies to Pilate in Xhosa–the language of political prisoners like Nelson Mandela.
Even the show’s simple staging is reminiscent of the apartheid era. While medieval productions dazzled the audience with flying angels and fire-breathing monsters, today’s set consists of basic planks and crates. Musical accompaniment is created with oil drums, dustbins, sticks and bottles–a reminder that a work of rare beauty and sensitivity has been created out of the remnants of an ugly history. Luckily for audiences, that translates into a provocative and witty evening of song.
