By Mpumzi Mshweshwe:
Theatre continues to poke the bear and pose questions to the public, aiming to reveal and expose the ills the world faces.
Potholes, written and directed by Thato Mazui, was on show over the weekend of 13 August, where the audience was made to ponder issues such as love, infidelity, miscarriage, and parenthood.
The play is a one-person show, also known as a one-hander, which is a play acted out by one.
Passion, anguish and love
The audience was taken on a ride where they saw Gift (Mvubu) laying bare his emotions on stage, from happiness to sadness, from passion to anguish, and from lover to deserter.
Gift and the appropriately named Lerato navigate their relationship through the troubles of infidelity and deception, with their love proving to be not enough to guide them through these obstacles.
Mazui’s Potholes does well to mirror reality and show us how families are broken apart, how people are driven to despair beyond recovery because of selfish acts.
Despair beyond redemption
Although the love the pair has for each other seems strong, as the play continues, the audience is shown how the possibility of having a child (which should be celebrated) is essentially the death of the relationship.
Gift changes from a loving partner to a doubtful one; he begins to doubt his love for Lerato, his ability to be a father, and the possibility that the child might not be his.
The change in Gifts’ emotions is made stronger by the serenading background music, making the atmosphere a somber one. The play made use of several metaphorical references to describe how relationships crumble and families are broken up.
Tyres of the same axle
Mvubu’s only stage prop was a tyre, of which he kept referring to Lerato, and saying that they were both tyres on the same axle going through a bumpy road full of potholes – a reference to the show’s name.
Little did he realise that these potholes were enough to burst the tyres and derail their journey of love to a screeching halt.
After hearing from Lerato that she was pregnant, Gift deals with a series of thoughts, with Mvubu doing an excellent job of acting out his fear of being a father and the denial of the pregnancy.
The man’s troubled heart
Speaking on what the show taught him, Mvubu posed the question of “who knows what a man goes through, and do we take into account what a man feels?”.
The Mvubu’s acting ability made the audience take his side as he managed to lay bare his unfiltered emotions, leaving the audience yearning for more insight into the heart and mind of a man.
Upon hearing of Lerato’s miscarriage, the story takes another swift turn, as now a conclusion could be drawn that Gift’s failure to accept the situation led to the stress that caused Lerato’s miscarriage.
Life has ups and downs
The story aimed and succeeded in addressing the fact that we are all humans and we all deal with situations differently.
Gift and Lerato’s love takes place in the workplace, and should their love be found out, they stand the chance of losing their jobs, and Gift has to deal with the possibility that he might lose his job and fail to take care of Lerato and the baby.
Coupled with the fact that he later finds that Lerato had been cheating on him, Gift reverts to a sympathetic character who fell headfirst into an unideal situation, with the pressure for him to remedy the situation.
Theatre is a terrain of education
Mazui’s Potholes was a prime example of how theatre, the first form of storytelling, is a place where people can go to learn and reflect on what society expects and what the reality of life is. Mazui described his play as a poor theatre with elements of physical theatre, where all types of emotions are shown to the audience in the hope that they themselves reflect on who they are. –@NewsSA_Online
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