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Karoo Moose
Written and directed by Lara Foot
Rating: 5/5
After watching Karoo Moose I am driving around Grahamstown and looking at people walking on the streets, innocent bystanders, and asking myself why they are not crying as well. I pull over. The world has come to a complete halt.
Looking out at a corner of the street where some cattle have decided to settle, a white stalk picking at the mouth of the one beautiful brown ox, I am struck at the quiet of the world.
I am asking myself why the performers were crying themselves at the end of the show, if this is normal? Tears streamed down their faces as the audience cheered and screamed.
What did I just watch, I ask myself? Why did the people on either side of me in the audience decide to join hands with me after the performance? Why were we supporting one another in our state of mutual anguish?
The performance proved once again that Karoo Moose is still, nearly a decade after it first debuted, one of the most important pieces of theatre in the South African canon.
It returns to the stage at this year’s National Arts Festival – the creation of this year’s festival Featured Artist Lara Foot with the original cast: Zoleka Helesi, Mdu Kweyama, Bongile Mantsai, Thami Mbongo, Apollo Ntshoko and Chuma Spotela, all now famous and respected in their own rights.
The piece uses song and percussion and movement and props and some of the most perfectly, lovingly crafted dialogue to tell the story of young Thozama whose innocence is stolen from her after she is gang raped in the village she lives in.
With the cast she grows up, before our eyes, into a woman whose language is that of the broken.
In one scene before her rape the narrator explains a moment of perfect idyll where Thozama gets to consider her life and ponder its fleetingness.
It made me sit up and consider my own transitory existence, and the very fleetingness of the art of theatre itself. It made my heart ache that so few get to experience a work of this stature, with such an important message.
I’m not sure if Lara knew the scale of work she was making at the time, or if she now knows just how monumental Karoo Moose is, but either way it is the work of something outside herself, something really rare and true.
It’s the sort of thing everyone should see at least once in their lives but be prepared to be shaken, it will change you forever.
