Play: The Mole People
Playwright: Frederick B Philander
Reviewer: Arlene Mouton
Last weekend, CAN staged a play ‘Mole People’ as part of a series of plays depicting the events that led to independence in Namibia.
A good stage piece by Frederick Philander and well performed by the cast under his directorship.
The rather poor showing of the audience of 40 people on opening night was disappointing but it should be appreciated that a consistent theatre tradition is lacking within the majority of the people of Namibia.
Attendance was greatly improved on the second night.
This particular play depicts the situation in the bush jails – ran by “the movement” in Angola toward the end of the apartheid era. It featured some intense and gripping scenes – the traumatic raping of one of the female prisoners, the re-capturing of two escapees, the ‘receiving and booking in’ of a new prisoner, a full body search performed on that same prisoner and the news of the bush war coming to an end, to name but a few.
Emotions such as, empathy, devotion, shame, disbelief, relief and satisfaction were clearly visible on the faces of the actors through out the duration of this play.
The presence of humour served to alleviate the somewhat sombre feeling of nostalgia one gets when you visit the bush wars in your thoughts, and which was eminent in this play due to the clear picture painted.
Although there were a few acting hiccups, it did not really matter as the quality of the end product more than made up for it. The rest of the Namibian nation that did not attend heavily missed out on a splendid depiction of a part of our history.
The next play in the Committed Artists of Namibia four-month Theatre Festival, Election Fever, will be staged at the Boiler Theatre of KCAC on Friday and Saturday 26-27 October.