and a new cult in Athens.
In Molora, the dying Bronze Age becomes the dying system of South African apartheid. Farber replaces the ancient Greek chorus with a chorus of Xhosa women singers. Those ancient Athenians sang melodies and danced, vigorously, in patterns we can only guess at now. But the hypnotic two-tone throat singing of this contemporary chorus creates an ecstatic atmosphere sufficient in itself, one in perfect harmony with the play and with its new South African venue. Aeschylus ended his famous Orestes trilogy of 458 B.C. with a torchlight procession as dusk fell over Athens, knitting up all the unanswered questions of his story with the irrational, energetic rush of pure celebration. The final chorus of Molora may be sung in a different language to different instruments than those known to Aeschylus, but the language of bodies in motion knows no borders, and the effect of this South African dance must be no less exhilarating than the memory of that long-ago torchlight parade. Likewise, the sword dance that Orestes performs in Molora as he circles around a smoldering altar hews with absolute truth to the spirit of Greek tragedy, not only because tragedy is the stylized product of an ancient circle dance around a burnt sacrifice, but because, in human terms, Orestes needs to work himself into a frenzy before he can contemplate doing what he must do with that sword – namely drive it into his mother. But Farber’s most brilliant transformation of the Orestes legend is to have the chorus, as the embodiment of Truth and Reconciliation, stop the murder before it has happened, to hold Orestes to their superior, forgiving justice before he awakens the Furies.
The justice in Ram, by contrast, is a bitter justice. The original version of the Hindu epic is thought to date from about the same time as Athenian tragedy, the 5-4th century B.C.E., its 50,000 verses centering on the battles of the virtuous hero Rama against vice in all its various forms. Farber, however, concentrates her attention on the story of Rama’s wife Sita, who represents purity and female divinity as Rama himself represents male virtue, and joins him in his battles. When Rama and Sita are living in the forest as exiles from his rightful kingdom, Sita is abducted by Ravana, the monstrous king of Sri Lanka. With the help of his brother and the Monkey God Hanuman, Rama eventually rescues his wife, but he doubts that she can have maintained her purity during her captivity; she finally proves herself by passing through fire. Even after they have been reunited, rumors persist about her, and eventually Rama abandons her (although they reunite again at the end of the Ramayana). A televised version of the story was extraordinarily popular in India in 1987-88, so much so that it sparked a strike by sanitation workers across northern India in 1988, who demanded that the federal government commission more episodes of the program. In Farber’s retelling, the theatre itself becomes a village gathered around a television set like the Indian audiences in 1987-88, and the discussion of Sita’s purity becomes graphically urgent when Ravana not only imprisons Sita, but finally rapes and kills her. Her ravaged physical self appears as a separate ‘Sita-body’ that takes its own part in the drama; Sita herself, like Rama, is immortal, the human embodiment of a goddess, but this process of psychological removal is well known in real victims of sexual assault. If the Sita-body is violated, then, does this mean that Sita herself is also defiled? Furthermore, as Ravana will discover, his act of violence ultimately turns back on itself without Rama and his armies having to come to the rescue. This retelling of the Ramayana holds Rama to a more trenchant definition of virtue than the traditional warrior’s prowess, and the loss of Sita is portrayed as an absolute loss to any society that suppresses the feminine side of divinity.
Mies Julie presents an equally harrowing examination of the dynamics between men and women, further complicated by conflicts of race, class, and rootedness in a particular place. Strindberg, in 1888, portrayed a consciously Darwinian struggle between Miss Julie, the countess who represents Sweden’s fading aristocracy, and the upward strivings of the valet Jean, in contrast with the long-suffering, pious cook Christine, Jean’s fiancée. It is Jean, in the end, who hands Miss Julie the razor with which she will presumably commit suicide offstage, thus ensuring the survival of the fittest. Farber shifts this drama to a South African farm in 2012, where Julie is no longer aristocratic, but simply white; in her own way, then, she is as tough as John, the black servant she has known since childhood and begins to challenge on a hot April 27, when the country stops to celebrate Freedom Day. Soon, of course, we see that true freedom from apartheid is still no more than a distant hope; Julie, John, and his mother Christine are entirely in its thrall. In Strindberg’s staging, Jean and Julie withdraw to Jean’s room when their flirtation takes a serious turn; here John and Julie copulate, hard, on the kitchen table in front of us. Like Strindberg’s couple, Farber’s pair dream in their uncomfortable afterglow of starting a hotel together, and in today’s world the idea has a plausibility it may not have had in Sweden in 1888. It is all the more shocking, therefore, when John kills Julie’s pet bird as useless extra baggage; apartheid has brutalized him as much as it has brutalized Julie at her most imperious. For her part, Christine, obsessed with the presence of her ancestors buried beneath the foundations of the house, brings on a searching discussion of who truly belongs to the soil of South Africa; for Julie’s ancestors lie buried there as well. Ultimately, it is this very sense of rootedness that destroys the brief dream that John and Julie spin of running off together, and when Julie kills herself – as she does, again, before our eyes – it is with a farm implement, a sickle, driven into her womb, which came so close to fostering the mixed-race children of a new South Africa. It is impossible to come away from Ram or Mies Julie without feeling that the world must change; Molora points the way. Yaël Farber’s theatre will leave no participant unmoved.
MOLORA
Foreword
by Yael Farber, Director and Adaptor
‘This thing called reconciliation… If I am understanding it correctly…if it means this perpetrator, this man who has killed my son, if it means he becomes human again, this man, so that I, so that all of us, get our humanity back…then I agree, then I support it all.’
Cynthia Ngwenyu, mother of one of the murdered Gugulethu 7, when facing her son’s state-sanctioned murderer at the TRC
In the aftermath of South Africa’s transition into democracy in 1994, the world held its collective breath in anticipation of a civil war that would surely unleash the rage of generations shattered by the Apartheid regime. South Africa defied expectations, however, lighting the way forward for all nations trapped in quagmires of revenge. Despite the praise Nelson Mandela received from ‘First World’ leaders for heralding great restraint through this transition in our troubled land, nothing could convince those same leaders to check their own ancient eye-for-an-eye, knee-jerk response and their resulting offensives of ‘Shock and Awe’ on the women and children of Baghdad. South Africa’s relatively peaceful transformation was an extraordinary exception in our vengeful world
But such a journey is neither simple nor easy, and has little to do with the reductive notions of a miraculously forgiving Rainbow Nation or ‘turning the other cheek’. In the epic eye of South Africa’s storm, it was not the gods – nor any deus ex machina – that delivered us from ourselves. It was the common everyman and everywoman who, in the years following democracy, gathered in modest halls across the country to face their perpetrators across a table, and find a way forward for us all.
The ancient Oresteia trilogy tells the story of the rightful heirs to the House of Atreus, dispossessed of their inheritance. Forced to live as a servant in the halls of her own father’s house, Elektra waits for her brother Orestes to return from exile to the land of his ancestors and take back what is rightfully theirs. The premise of this ancient story was striking to me as a powerful canvas on which to explore the history of dispossession, violence and human-rights violations in the country I grew up in. I had long been interested in creating a work that explores the journey back from the dark heart of unspeakable trauma and pain – and the choices facing those shattered by the past.
Molora is an examination of the spirals of violence begat by vengeance, and the breaking of such cycles
