By BRUCE DENNILL
Far Gone / Directed by Mojisola Kareem / Lesedi, Joburg Theatre, Braamfontein, Johannesburg
Initially, Far Gone feels like a late-night festival piece, with the audience on three sides and the performer – John Rwothomack, a Ugandan based in Sheffield in the UK – onstage as the audience enters, interacting with slightly bemused people who are not expecting to be called upon to interact with the actor.
During this period where people are wandering in and finding their seats, Rwothomack communicates with a weirdly high-pitched voice, inviting onlookers to “come and play” in front of everybody. When a couple of brave souls do, he shows them a game played by Ugandan children and it begins to become clear what is happening: he is in character as a child, setting the scene for a play about kids who have their innocence torn out of them by horrific circumstances beyond their control.
The play’s protagonist, Okumu, is a sensitive soul with an older brother who is typically gruff and impatient with him. The pair live in a rural village where, one day, the Lord’s Resistance Army or LRA (a real, brutal, cult-like, extremist organisation founded in the 1980s by self-appointed warlord ‘messiah’ Joseph Kony and known for abducting children and forcing them to wield guns and commit atrocities in the name of ‘freedom fighting’) rolls through their home, killing and kidnapping as they go.
Rwothomack plays all the characters – Okumu; his brother; a gruff, ruthless LRA commander; an unhinged LRA soldier and more – with striking, totally committed physical investment, throwing himself around, curling up in a ball, flinching, attacking, weeping and sneering according to who he is playing and what part of the story is unfolding at the time.
The action sometimes feels slightly unbalanced – frenetic action scenes played against almost sluggish, atmospheric passages that give a sense of the headspace of the characters while possibly also giving Rwothomack a chance to get his breath back, like ballet soloists after a taxing pas de deux. Those breaks do give you a chance to process what you’re seeing onstage – blind commitment to power through violence and the manipulation needed to get others to believe in the same ideals and act accordingly. In context, it’s a fictional interpretation of real events that have happened and continue to happen in central Africa (the LRA remains active in Uganda, the DRC, the Central African Republic, Sudan and South Sudan), but beyond that it can also be seen as a metaphor for the far gentler but equally inexorable being worn down by the complexities of life in general, and of how anyone coming out on the far side of hardship is often harder themselves.
Brave, conceptual theatre, sometimes tough to watch but ultimately successful in imparting its themes and the dire warnings that come with them.