On the opening night of The Promise, a new stage adaptation of Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning novel, I caught a snippet of conversation between the author and some acquaintances hobnobbing in the foyer. “The main difference between the book and the play,” he reassured them, “is that the play is much funnier”.
Galgut was doing himself a disservice. The low-key mordant humour of the novel is indeed turned into a sustained metatheatrical comic mode that serves as a counterpoint to the grim plotline. But collaborating with director Sylvaine Strike to develop the prose text into a dramatic script, Galgut has woven a complex set of intertextual strands into a new hybrid work.
As a result, the play asks a lot of its audience. Many will feel that three hours’ traffic on the stage is asking too much; that Galgut and Strike should have followed the writerly creed, “kill your darlings” (in other words, cut the bits that don’t serve your purpose even if they are wonderful in their own right). Others will be delighted by the stage version’s preservation of novelistic digressions, unnecessary but pleasing cameos that sketch quirky portraits of minor characters, or the storyteller’s hesitation over when to bring a tale to an end.
This is apt because The Promise is, both in its style and its subject, crucially concerned with who gets to tell a story — the story, in a sense, the overfamiliar SA story of race and land, dispossession and restitution. This particular version of that story focuses on white neurosis and its consequences rather than black experience and its psychological dimensions, though the figure at its moral centre is a black woman.
Salome (Chuma Sopotela) is a domestic worker who spends decades in service to the “wit” Swart family on their farm outside Pretoria. One by one, as the country shifts from apartheid to a nominally postapartheid era, from president to president, the Swarts die: first Rachel, the matriarch (Kate Normington); then Manie, the patriarch (Frank Opperman); then their older children, Astrid (Jenny Stead) and Anton (Rob van Vuuren). It is left to the youngest and only remaining Swart child, Amor (Jane de Wet), to ensure that a promise is eventually kept — Salome becomes the owner of a tumbledown house on a now derelict piece of veld where she has been living with her son, farm labourer Lukas (Sanda Shandu), for half a century.
The stellar cast (completed by Albert Pretorius and Cintaine Schutte) revels in the playful, self-reflexive ensemble approach facilitated by Galgut and Strike. In one sense, there is a kind of hypertheatricality to The Promise. The tiered set, props and soundscape create a surreal mood. The actors are themselves characters in a play-outside-the-play that requires them to figure out how to tell a story. Moreover, the characters that they portray sometimes seem to know how that story goes and sometimes are bemused by it — or at least they try unsuccessfully to resist the inevitable conclusions that have been scripted for them.
In another sense, then, The Promise onstage remains very much bound to “the book”. There is Galgut’s novel, which both is and is not the physical book that gets passed around by the actors as they take turns to narrate (Salome is the primary narrator, giving her an authority on stage that she lacks in the novel). Then there is the book of fate, as it were, in which individuals have little agency and simply reinscribe the pattern of what has come before them.
Here one may challenge Galgut’s vision of SA, which — despite questions of individual complicity or redemption — ultimately appears to offer few possibilities for deviation from type. Clownishly Calvinistic white Afrikaners and their self-centred, supercilious English counterparts are doomed by the fractured psyche of inherited racism. Black people are doomed to be representatives of collective suffering, having only the choice between angry begrudging servitude and quietly stoical servitude, rather than being free to dwell in complex subjectivity. Happily, the playfulness of The Promise on stage escapes these constraints.
• ‘The Promise’ is at the Homecoming Centre’s Star Theatre in Cape Town until October 6 and the Market Theatre in Johannesburg from October 18 to November 5.
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