By BRUCE DENNILL
Once Upon A Teacup / Directed by James Cuningham / Theatre On The Square, Sandton, Johannesburg
In a happily expanding niche that includes pieces such as Every Brilliant Thing and The King Of Broken Things, Once Upon A Teacup examines, with beautiful creative ideas, the magic and exquisite angst of not being able to remain innocently and naively child-like forever. It’s a profound space from which to draw information, not least because every audience member to ever see the play has already, or soon will, go through something similar – and probably without the tools necessary to process it properly.
Writer Jessica Haines plays Violet, a young, white, African girl – plenty of baggage already evident on that one introductory sentence – who is gleefully, giddily joyful as she explores her surroundings, finds hidden treasures and enjoys endless cups of tea. Haines’ depth of skill as a physical performer – face-filling, vibrant expressions matched by lithe, twisting, tightly controlled body movements, all while narrating the action in quirky rhyming couplets.
To her movement and bright-eyed engagement with the audience, Haines adds several sequences of shadow work, disappearing behind screens and positioning cleverly designed props just so in front of illumination to make clear and often moving shadow images appear on the screens – a wolf; a house approached along a picket fence; the eerie branches of a tree blowing in the wind. It’s a powerfully different way of presenting a story and in and of itself, that aspect of the piece poetically intrigues and entertains.
The other characters in the story all exist only in Violet’s storytelling, but they are no less powerful for that – archetypes that are tragically familiar to anyone who has bent their own identity and personality to what they perceive to be popular or more respected in a community they think they want to be a part of. There is a repeated motif in Haines’ script, with Violet moving from stage to stage, shedding purity and sincerity along the way, by noting that, in response to prompting by a person or a tradition or a cultural more, she “acquiesces” to change. It’s the best possible word to use in the context, implying not only acceptance of what is expected of her but complicity in making the change. The latter is where the true emotional depth of the concept and this story lies: we, in general – and Violet, onstage – have something sublime, something delicate, something poignantly perfect, and then we choose to give it away on the say-so or example of a stranger, or someone we know to be deeply flawed, or a custom that has never sat well with us.
It’s an overwhelmingly agonising crossroads of emotion and action, of maturity and artlessness, and it’s thoughtfully imagined and presented by Haines, refined by director James Cuningham, himself a Jacques Lecoq-trained physical performer. Many plays leave you thinking after you leave the theatre; this one leaves you feeling.