The Stage

The Mysteries - Yiimimangaliso

Published Wednesday 16 September 2009 at 11:25 by Mark Shenton

There’s no mystery to the success of the Mysteries. Some 700 years since the Chester medieval guilds first staged their own rough-theatre version of the biblical stories, they’ve been roughed up again and re-contextualised to an African setting. Here, they are given a fresh, spirited and vibrant makeover by Isango Portobello, a company based in Cape Town, whose members are drawn from a notorious township called Khayelitsha, described in a programme feature as “one of the great slums of the world”.

The company, who last year brought their Olivier award-winning production of The Magic Flute to the West End, previously brought this production to Wilton’s Music Hall in 2001, from where it transferred to the Queen’s in 2002, and its return now is doubly welcome. While South Africa is still going through the palpable growing pains of its new democracy, it is good to be reminded of the kind of artistic health that can produce shows like this. The kind of extreme conditions that many of its members still live in have been channelled into something else - a communal sharing of life-enhancing story-telling that is as moving as it is frequently miraculous.

The sense of dignity and purpose that this astonishing company of 33 duly bring to re-animating these familiar stories is palpable. And even if some of the characterisations in director Mark Dornford-May’s production are a little crudely drawn - and it is eventually repetitious, too, in the theatrical techniques it employs - there’s still something so utterly authentic about the atmosphere it conjures throughout that this epic piece of multicultural theatre speaks to us all, regardless of the language barrier.

In fact, it speaks in several languages - often all at once - from medieval English to Xhosa, Tswana, Afrikaans and Zulu. And though it may have helped to have surtitles, you get the drift, as we follow from the birth of man (with Adam and Eve conjured in giant paper puppets) to the birth of Jesus (with Bethlehem represented by a simple bale of hay) and his eventual crucifixion. But there’s a theatrical boldness to it, too, that has both God and Jesus played by the same spirited woman Pauline Malafane.

There’s an elemental spiritual power to these stories, and the performers bring a pulsating physicality and raw energy to them to make them resonate anew.