A Christmas Carol
What is impressive is the musical skill that the company, under the baton of Mandisis Dyantyis, brings to Mozart’s work. Listening to the overture played on marimbas is like hearing it with fresh ears. The first act duet between Pamina and Papageno, hymning “the gentle love of man and woman”, acquires a new ecstasy when accompanied by soft, rhythmic hand-clapping. Pauline Malefane is a magnificent Queen of the Nightunafraid to hit those soaring high notes.
And Zamile Gantana’s Papageno not only possesses a natural comic spirit, but makes his quest for the ideal mate genuinely touching. You come out feeling that Mozart’s great work has been totally reimagined. The company bring the same rich inventiveness to A Christmas Carol. Here Scrooge is a woman, played again by Pauline Malefane, who has sacrificed familial relationships and a singing career to become the boss of a gold-mining company.
She talks blithely of death “decreasing the surplus population”. But she is confronted by images of her younger self and there is a chilling moment when, as she is reminded that “a child dies of ignorance or want every three seconds”, the theatre falls appropriately silent. As with the Mozart, Dickens’s fable is reinvigorated by the cultural shift: it becomes the story of a woman who has forgotten her township origins in the accumulation of wealth.