Farber: Plays One

Molora; RAM: The Abduction of Sita into Darkness; Mies Julie

Yaël Farber

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783196500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro britannico

Molora - Based on The Oresteia by Aeschylus In this reworking of Aeschylus' Oresteia, Klytemnestra and Elektra face one another in a dramatic confrontation. Attempts to come to terms with their violent past echo testimonies delivered in Apartheid's wake throughout South Africa during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. RAM: The Abduction of Sita into Darkness - Based on The Ramayana by Valmiki Farber's potent revisioning of this age-old text is a raw and probing contemporary work which places the loss of the Feminine Divine, and thus our lack of spiritual and moral equilibrium, at its visceral core. This is a Ramayana for a new world. Mies Julie - Based on Miss Julie by August Strindberg Transposed to a post-apartheid kitchen – a single night, both brutal and tender, unfolds between a black farm-labourer, the daughter of his master and the woman who has raised them both. The visceral struggles of contemporary South Africa are laid bare, as John and Mies Julie spiral in a deadly battle over power, sexuality, mothers and memory.

MOLORA

Foreword

by Yael Farber, Director and Adaptor

‘This thing called reconciliation… If I am understanding it correctly…if it means this perpetrator, this man who has killed my son, if it means he becomes human again, this man, so that I, so that all of us, get our humanity back…then I agree, then I support it all.’

Cynthia Ngwenyu, mother of one of the murdered Gugulethu 7, when facing her son’s state-sanctioned murderer at the TRC

In the aftermath of South Africa’s transition into democracy in 1994, the world held its collective breath in anticipation of a civil war that would surely unleash the rage of generations shattered by the Apartheid regime. South Africa defied expectations, however, lighting the way forward for all nations trapped in quagmires of revenge. Despite the praise Nelson Mandela received from ‘First World’ leaders for heralding great restraint through this transition in our troubled land, nothing could convince those same leaders to check their own ancient eye-for-an-eye, knee-jerk response and their resulting offensives of ‘Shock and Awe’ on the women and children of Baghdad. South Africa’s relatively peaceful transformation was an extraordinary exception in our vengeful world

But such a journey is neither simple nor easy, and has little to do with the reductive notions of a miraculously forgiving Rainbow Nation or ‘turning the other cheek’. In the epic eye of South Africa’s storm, it was not the gods – nor any deus ex machina – that delivered us from ourselves. It was the common everyman and everywoman who, in the years following democracy, gathered in modest halls across the country to face their perpetrators across a table, and find a way forward for us all.

The ancient Oresteia trilogy tells the story of the rightful heirs to the House of Atreus, dispossessed of their inheritance. Forced to live as a servant in the halls of her own father’s house, Elektra waits for her brother Orestes to return from exile to the land of his ancestors and take back what is rightfully theirs. The premise of this ancient story was striking to me as a powerful canvas on which to explore the history of dispossession, violence and human-...