The Stage

Karoo Moose

Published Wednesday 17 June 2009 at 14:05 by Mark Shenton

The Tricycle continues to place itself truly on the global theatrical map: after its recent all-day trilogy of specially commissioned new plays about Afghanistan, it now returns to South Africa - a country whose theatre it has regularly championed in the past - with this vibrant, powerful story of survival and redemption in the remote Karoo desert that cleverly wrong-foots your initial expectations.

Cast as a folk fable about a young girl Thomaza’s chance encounter with an escaped Moose - the gift of the Swedish ambassador - Lara Foot Newton’s play in fact goes into far darker territories, as she wrestles with the legacies of her mother’s murder, a father who pays off his gambling debts by sacrificing her virginity to his debtor, her subsequent pregnancy, the kidnap of her child, and eventually her escape to a new life.

That’s a lot to cram into just 90 minutes of storytelling theatre that flits between narration and staged action. But Lara Foot Newton’s production of her own play is fleet of foot in every sense, driven as a physical theatre spectacle of movement to the constant beat of drums and interludes of song.

There’s a fluid economy to the bare-bones staging that is as beguiling as the performances are utterly sincere. And Newton creates spine-tingling, memorable moments, such as the birth of Thomaza’s child through an upturned drum, or the moose embodied by the branches of a palm, that pulse with theatricality. Chuma Sopotela is vulnerable and touching as Thomaza, while the other five actors juggle several roles each.