Zakes Mda’s And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses belongs to a venerable theatrical tradition: a play in which two characters, stuck between one place and another, are waiting. They are simultaneously codependent and mutually resentful, staving off despair with stories, games, faltering conversation, role-playing, arguments and occasional laughter.
The urtext here is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), in which the unhappy hobos Vladimir and Estragon pass the time of day at the side of an unnamed road in the middle of nowhere. In Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), the title characters are trapped in a play-within-the-play and end up on a ship taking them inexorably towards their fate. Further variations range from Jean Genet’s The Maids (1947) to Harold Pinter’s confused hitmen in The Dumb Waiter (1957).
South African incarnations of these pairs may be found in Boesman and Lena (1969) and indeed in multiple other Athol Fugard plays. Given our country’s history, it seemed that playwrights could hardly do anything but place their characters in such circumstances: displaced, downtrodden, wanting to claim some freedom and agency but unable to speak directly to power. The result could be psychological realism or satirical absurdism, or both within the same work.
So it is with Mda’s play, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1988 and features two characters, The Lady and The Woman, who are waiting in an unmoving queue to buy government-subsidised rice. They are caught somewhere between Lesotho, where Mda lived for more than two decades (it is the setting for a number of his plays and novels) and Cape Town — where, within the world of the play, The Woman has a complicated past.
They are also “in” Cape Town for a new production of And the Girls in their Sunday Dresses running at the Baxter Theatre until March 7, directed by Mdu Kweyama, with Tamzin Daniels as The Lady and Awethu Hleli as The Woman. As such, these characters also implicitly move between the present moment and the late-apartheid period in which Mda was writing.
Kweyama affirms in his director’s note that the play is a “South African classic” and that staging it for a new generation of theatregoers allows it to speak to “global themes” of “hunger, unemployment and inequality”. Certainly, the play warns against parochialism, challenging audiences to think about how countries (neighbouring or otherwise) are interconnected and how struggles are shared across borders.
Yet, while there are resonances on a broad thematic level, it is perhaps inevitable that the grappling with precarity, want and oppression feels somehow dated. This distance — linguistic, ideological or otherwise — is most marked if the play is viewed, however unfairly, through an intersectional feminist lens. While it may be considered a critique of the patriarchal power structures under which The Lady and The Woman must live, the dialogue itself is more an account of “men behaving badly” than a protest against a system.
It would be an overstatement to say that the playwright is mansplaining through his female characters. He does occasionally seem more interested in philandering men and in the “Johns” who are The Lady’s clients (she is a sex worker). Nevertheless, both the friction and the growing intimacy between the two women allow Hleli and Daniels to explore their different approaches. The Lady is inclined to “make nice”, to play the game, cosying up to power — or at least flattering it. The Woman recognises that there is no point in aspiring to be one of the “girls” of the play’s title (well-dressed, respectable women who could work in a government office).
Hleli and Daniels are particularly good in the play’s comic bits, notably when they parody church services and the hypocrisy of people who have “seen the light”. Their performances are disrupted by the curious insertion of a series of physical theatre interludes, an innovation that seems to be motivated by a desire to add psychological depth or angst to the characters’ interior lives. Ultimately, however, this attempt to update, supplement or enrich the play is at odds with its more prosaic realist mode and merely serves to underline what may be missing from the text itself.
This article was first published in Business Day.
