‘Lungs’ — spotlight falls on 21st-century liberal dilemmas in this masterful production

The staggeringly good production of Lungs, currently playing at Montecasino’s Pieter Toerien Studio, opens with broadcasts of a climate catastrophe. It closes, many years later, with broadcasts of a climate catastrophe. Plus ça change, as they say. Between those parentheses, we track the struggles of a millennial-ish liberal couple who sort of maybe want to start a family? But, oy vey, the carbon footprint inflicted on the planet by a baby human!

To breed or not to breed, that is the question.

In other words, Lungs is the most Jewish piece of theatre not written by a Jewish playwright. There’s kvetching, kvelling, kibitzing and, most importantly, napping. Written by the English playwright Duncan Macmillan and first performed in 2011, it is seamlessly adapted for the South African context by director Bianca Amato.

The story begins, as most stories do, in Checkers. M has just suggested to his longtime girlfriend, L, that they take a stab at, you know, having a little guy. This sends L into an existential bout of hand-wringing, exposing all sorts of fissures in a relationship that is premised, above all, on maintaining the illusion of Mutually Assured Goodness. Goodness in this case mostly means telegraphing goodness, speaking about goodness, and occasionally not being good — and then kvetching about it later. (So. Much. Kvetching.)

M and L are products of the Age of Anxiety, and commensurately insufferable because of it. They are the type of liberals that conservatives love to mock, because their contradictions outweigh their certainties by a factor of hilariousness. But as annoying as they may be, they are relatable. And here Lungs enters the perilous territory of cringe realism — your ability to stomach the play depends upon your ability to digest 21st-century middle-class pieties. It’s a credit to Macmillan’s skill as a writer that Lungs remains satirical even when verisimilitude threatens to render it painfully photo-realistic. Am I these people? you ask. Am I this much of a prat?

Without anything to cut the high-end hair-shirtery, Lungs places enormous burdens on its two performers. Happily, they are up for it. A classic two-hander, Sanda Shandu and Jazzara Jaslyn depict the slow reciprocal torture perpetrated by two people who simply can’t find a working definition of the word “responsibility”. Are they responsible for and to each other? To a prospective family? To the planet? Can the three be reconciled?

“I’d be giving birth to the Eiffel Tower,” L says, referring to the carbon footprint generated by new human life. And while she’s right, surely not every human life can be graded by its CO2 emissions? Is she hiding her own insecurities behind the fig leaf of protecting fig leaves? Or is she just Greta Thunberg with a flotilla-load of personal hang-ups?

As with childbirth, most of the play’s success hinges on Jaslyn’s performance. She renders her character brittle, smart, conflicted and, on occasion, wise. It’s a tour de force. Shandu’s task is more subtle — he’s the foil, the straightman, the “nice guy” who, ultimately, isn’t that nice, and is better off for it. The couple are a cliche — or, rather, a Checkers trolley-load full of cliches — but one suspects that’s exactly the point Macmillan is making: contemporary life is a grab-bag of slogans and shibboleths that, ultimately, don’t add up to anything fruitful, sustainable or meaningful.

As noted, Macmillan wants these themes explored with minimal interference. The play’s stage direction is precise: “Performed on a bare stage, no scenery, no props, no mime, no costume changes. No light or sound to indicate place or time, no interval. Forward slashes to mark the point of interruption in overlapping dialogue, a comma on a separate line to indicate a pause.”

Amato uses this to her advantage, employing movement and blocking to announce time and place shifts. (The set design by Patrick Curtis is appropriately minimalist, while lighting and sound, by Denis Hutchinson and Neil Kuny, respectively, further build out the play’s real-world adumbrations.) The rapid-fire line delivery accentuates, rather than distracts from, the emerging themes — Lungs is expertly rendered theatre, directed by a pro. It’s kind of amazing that Johannesburg still sustains so much of this stuff — just go watch Afropocalypse at the Market Theatre for further proof of world-classness.

Since its debut in 2011, Lungs has lost none of its climate-themed urgency, and yet it is not a play about climate change. It’s a work that stares straight into the eye of the eternal question: How and who are we meant to be? There never has been, and may never be, an easy answer. And it always comes with its fair share of CO2 emissions. DM