CHRIS THURMAN: Rediscovering the ordinary as the world burns

We live in a time of spectacle. Trump and company “flooding the zone” of media and public discourse — in the US and around the world — with outrageous announcements and cruel antics. Natural disasters caused by climate crisis. And for years now we have witnessed what could, in SA writer and intellectual Njabulo Ndebele’s terms, be described as the “spectacular” suffering of the people of Palestine and the Ukraine.

In the 1980s, Ndebele observed that the challenge facing his fellow writers was to avoid simply representing the gruesome spectacle of apartheid, casting black South Africans as heroes or victims in an epic tale of oppression and struggle. The task, he felt, was to “rediscover the ordinary”, to tell stories of people going about their lives with dignity and quiet courage. Or perhaps failing to do so. That, too, is ordinary.

It is to this terrain — the small story, the everyday — that Mike van Graan has turned his attention in two new plays: To Life, With Love performed by John Maytham and I Can Buy Myself Flowers featuring Erika Breytenbach.

Van Graan has never been one to shy away from the Big Stories. White versus black. Muslim versus Jewish. Gender-based violence. Food security. Land ownership. HIV/Aids. State capture. He has collaborated with a series of artists to produce political satires tackling the complexities and contradictions of the post-apartheid state.

But if these one-handers were pared down to travel — especially the most recent iteration, My Fellow South Africans, which Kim Blanche Adonis toured to all corners of the country — and were thus “small” productions tackling “big” issues, the pair of plays now on stage in Cape Town emphatically turn to reflections on the more modest life well lived, out of the limelight and away from the headlines.

Both have protagonists who are looking back from the vantage point of middle age. In To Life, With Love, Thomas (Maytham) must face his mortality when dread disease looms. In I Can Buy Myself Flowers, Natalie (Breytenbach) is coming to terms with what it means to be a single woman in her 50s in a society that is not generally kind to this demographic.

With a group of friends — they call themselves “Six in the City” — Natalie navigates parenthood, sex, life after divorce and how to be a good citizen without always putting the needs of others ahead of your own. This perhaps is where, in patriarchal societies around the globe, collective crisis and personal freedom meet: men need to escape the conditioning of selfishness, women the conditioning of selflessness. 

I like myself, Natalie affirms in the closing lines of the play, I’ve come to terms with me, and I’m not going to compromise on being me-in-the-world. Those of us who are parenting women of a younger generation fervently hope our daughters won’t take a lifetime to reach this resolution. Perhaps that’s why we cry when Elphaba, witch and heroine in the musical Wicked, sings her culminating declaration: “It’s me!”

Natalie’s position is not one of me-before-all-others. Van Graan’s script is still attentive to matters of social justice: race, privilege, homophobia. This is not a version of US vice-president JD Vance’s perversion of St Augustine’s theology (Vance recently argued that being a Christian means loving “me and mine” and putting “others” way down on your list of priorities). Rather, it belongs in a different philosophical tradition — one that offers both comfort and a challenge to those of us feeling ill-equipped to help in a planet on fire.

French philosopher Voltaire’s 1759 novel Candide has a protagonist who constantly encounters calamity; he sees others’ misery, while he experiences violence and loss. What is to be done? The novel ends with the sage words of an elderly Turkish man advising Candide and his fellows to “cultivate their own garden”. This may mean giving up on the idea of utopia, accepting the limits of human progress, but working steadfastly on ourselves and making peace with our humble place in the world.

• ‘I Can Buy Myself Flowers’ is at the Drama Factory until February 15. ‘To Life, With Love’ is at the Waterfront Theatre School until February 22 and at the Drama Factory from February 28 to March 2.