The event was to launch this year’s play by the Kwasha! Theatre Company, a group formed to give graduates from the Market Theatre Laboratory their first professional job and a guaranteed salary for a year. Except that the latest batch of students graduated into a world where theatres were closed, audiences were banned and nobody knew how it would all survive.

Its members have explored digital opportunities, and worked on various Zoom events including some international cooperations. They recently launched what would normally have been a “proof we’re professional” stage show, but instead of filling an auditorium they turned Boris Vian’s absurdist play The Empire Builders into an audio experience that people can stream for free during the month of February 2021.

After that, Kwasha! and its sponsor, the French Institute of South Africa, hope that schools will broadcast the play to interest youngsters in the theatrical arts, and that it will also get broader reach through radio or as part of online festivals.

The play is in three episodes of 20 minutes each, recorded binaurally using two microphones with the sounds transmitted separately into each ear to give listeners a sense of space and dimension.

Although it’s entirely aural, director Dintshitile Mashile found she needed to physically stage it for the actors to properly flesh out their personalities and convey the meaning of their lines.

Dintshitile Mashile, Photography ©Oscar Gutierrez

Photography ©Oscar Gutierrez

“I needed a couch and a set and costumes so the cast really got into the part,” she says.

At first, she found the whole experience daunting, suffering bouts of imposter syndrome. She overcame that with the support of the team and particularly from Clara Vaughan, head of the Market Theatre Laboratory.

“Last year we were professionally challenged because we had to stay at home, but something extraordinary happened because we got to make one of the most interesting and diverse programmes of work because of the constraints we were under,” Vaughan explains.

“I love the fact that we are being pushed into these new experiences and spaces. Dintshitile has shown tremendous courage as a young theatre director in a time when none of us really knows what to do, and she leapt into this challenge with great courage and great success.”

Last year was the 100th anniversary of the birth of French playwright, poet and musician Boris Vian. The Empire Builders is an absurdist tragi-comedy based on his childhood experience of the Nazi occupation. It’s the story of a family terrorised by their fears of a mysterious noise and of the Schmürz, a bleeding creature swathed in bandages. Their fear forces them on an upward spiral through their apartment building into progressively smaller rooms, shedding their possessions and people along the way, yet maintaining a façade of denial.

The cast members are Joel Leonard as Father; Sboniso Thombeni as Mother; Upile Bongco as the daughter, Zenobia; Mosie Mamaregane as Mugg the maid; and Wonder Ndlovu as Schmürz and the neighbour. The mood is created by a multilayered soundscape by sound designer Yogin Sullaphen; images displayed in a gallery online give for a better dive into the play and a greater connection with the characters, as one listens to the audioplay.

Even though one might only listen to the play while at home, an experience different from listening to it while the action unfolds on a theatre stage, the theatre of the mind is a powerful tool. The complex sound landscape in the first episode is often so busy that it muffled some of the words; but the intensity reduced nicely in the second episode, allowing for a better unfolding of the story and the sounds of moving, losing, fear and confusion. At times, it can feel truncated and disjointed in its brevity, especially with no visual clues to guide you. But the actors clearly develop their characters through the intonation and personalities they give them.

Photography ©Oscar Gutierrez

Photography ©Oscar Gutierrez

Backstage.com describes The Empire Builders as a politically-inspired allegory about the fear of an invisible enemy, and says it’s irresistible not to connect it to current issues. That could be a terrorist threat, or in Vian’s native France when he wrote it, the increased influx of “dark-skinned immigrants”. The author died before his play could be produced and scrutinised for its meaning.

“The play addresses themes such as alienation, selfishness, self-deception, prejudice, memory, masculinity, and the incomprehensibility of existence and meaning,” says Mashile.

For South Africa, perhaps there are elements of the damage from apartheid and future dangers of xenophobia. By the third episode the Father is alone and contemplative.

“We are racing towards the future at full speed, going so fast that we cannot see the present, and the dust raised by pounding feet hides the past from us. Closing one’s eye to the evidence is a method which has never been effective,” he says. DM/ ML

You can hear the play on www.empirebuildersinsa.org.