Magnet Theatre has been going for an astonishing 37 years, creating award-winning work for the stage and contributing to the performing arts sector through its training and development programmes, which help young artists access tertiary education and employment opportunities.
A sustained interest of founders Jennie Reznek and Mark Fleishman, dating back at least to their 1994 production of Medea, has been the adaptation of Greek mythology to an SA context.
The latest iteration is mAnJE! MaNJe (an epic), which explores the “Cretan” myth cycle, a series of interconnected stories told in multiple — frequently contradictory — versions by various cultures across the Aegean Sea between 3,000BC and 1,100BC. The result is a rich tapestry of characters whose passions, weaknesses, striving and suffering represent core aspects of the human experience: violence, ingenuity, redemption, loss.
There is Europa, the princess abducted by Zeus (taking the form of a white bull) to Crete. Minos, their son, becomes obsessed by a different divine bull; so too Pasiphae, Minos’ wife, who gives birth to the half-human, half-bull Minotaur. Then there is Daedalus, the architect/engineer/artist, who boasts of great feats (he designs the labyrinth that contains the Minotaur) but whose inventions are shadowed by ambition’s dark side: he kills his nephew, a competitor, and loses his own son Icarus when he flies too high. There is also macho hero Theseus, who kills the Minotaur with the help of Minos and Pasiphae’s daughter Ariadne, only to abandon her as he embarks on a new adventure.
The Magnet ensemble deftly weaves all these episodes together into something like a chronological narrative, but, as Fleishman points out in his director’s note, the epic form does not usually order events neatly. More often, its storytelling advances through “paroxysm — explosions of energy driven by transgression” rather than through a recounting of “causative” actions. Events, in epic, play out in a “distorted sequence” or through a “telescoping of time”, zooming in and out, punctuated by interludes and digressions.
The epic form thus resonates with our “contemporary sense of time”: in the digital age “we zap from point to point or from one intense moment to the next”, longing instinctively for a sense of temporal coherence but with no real hope of achieving it because we lack “duration, the experience of time passing, of lingering slowly and intently or attentively”.
This is where the show’s title is a stroke of genius. Whatever may be encoded in the mixture of capital and lower-case letters, the uniquely SA “manje manje” (now now) speaks to a profound truth about the human experience. There is no tangible “now” — there is only what has “just happened” or is “about to happen” at an uncertain point. The phrase, like the production itself, “links the past and the future together”: these European myths form part of “the detritus of our past, the ruined remains of our colonial history”, but we nonetheless “find inscribed there an image of our human future and the future of this planet we call our home”.
mAnJE! MaNJe poses big questions. What does it mean to be human — as opposed to animal, as opposed to machine? What are the risks and rewards of art and science? Are we fundamentally selfish creatures doomed to return to the overheated sea from which life first came? Can we save ourselves?
This intellectual framework is not, however, worthy or obscure. On the contrary, the ensemble, led by Mwenya Kabwe as a narrator-figure in multiple incarnations and Reznek as a disarmingly recognisable Daedelus, draw us into a vivid world by turns comic and tragic, bawdy and poignant, hedonistic and tender. Neo Muyanga’s captivating and eclectic musical composition, Marcus Neustetter’s intricate visual projections and Ina Wichterich’s beautiful choreography shape each episode and interlude.
Reznek and Kabwe’s performance text borrows from Homer and Sophocles but inserts itself, lyrically and eloquently, into the inspiring tradition of translating and updating these ancient voices. With song, dance and digital components seamlessly integrated by a polished cast and creative team, this is a production that must surely have a life beyond its short first run.
• mAnJE! MaNJe (an epic) is at the Magnet Theatre in Observatory, Cape Town, until 16 November.
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