Mike van Graan still causing us to pause

The honour bestowed on Mike van Graan as 2013 Festival Playwright allows us to see a compendium of work by this important South African writer. Four of his plays are presented by Artscape this year and Van Graan, who has a long history as a struggle artist under apartheid and cultural activist since democracy, still causes South Africans to pause. In Brothers in Blood, he presents a very tight script which takes an up-close and personal look at the politics, economics and social intercourse of Cape Town a few years after democracy. It is a community whose lives interact in diverse ways as apartheid, cross-cultural prejudices, social consciousness, religion, gangsterism and drug abuse all impact on the lives of ordinary people. It calls to mind Hollywood director Paul Haggis' 2004 movie Crash, as it interweaves racialised experiences of people who, on the surface, have no connections to each other. The acting in Brothers is superb across the cast but the youthful competence of Aimee Valentine and Harrison Makubalo as Leila Abrahams and Fadiel Suleiman must be highlighted. First produced in 2009 at the height if xenophobic and gang violence, some of the material may appear dated but one senses these issues are still very much a reality for Capetonians. Rainbow scars is a looser script which examines white mother Ellen's adoption of black child Lindiwe. Lindiwe has to deal with the questioning which most adopted children experience at some point about their place in their new family, with the added complication of dealing with alienation from her former extended family across South Africa's racial and class divides. On the surface, Rainbow throws up all the challenges of defining identity in a post-apartheid era. But typically of Van Graan's work, there is much more happening at an underlying level within the characters' lives. Ellen is divorced from her fraudster husband who is shortly due to be released from prison. Lindiwe's cousin Sicelo comes back into her life to expose the individual and family conflict hiding below. The other Van Graan plays at this year's festival are Panic with Siv Ngesi and the world premier of Writer's Block, directed by Jenny Rebelo. - Ray Hartle