Review: (Montreal) Waiting for the Barbarians

Chuma Sopotela (photo credit: Andrée Lanthier)

Grasping "The Other"

JM Coetzee's masterpiece comes to the Segal stage

by Caitlin Murphy

Though we think that we fear our enemies, we actually dream them. They are fictions that we fetishize as they give specific target for our untenably general fears.

This is the paradox that anchors South African born writer and Nobel Prize Winner J.M. Coetzee’s brilliant 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians.  His narrative of imperialism, adapted for the stage by Alexandre Marine, premiered in Cape Town last year, and is currently being presented at the Segal Centre as a co-production with Maurice Podbrey’s South African theatre company, MoPo Cultural Trust.

Narration on stage, almost pro forma, feels much more declarative and assured

Set in an unnamed frontier town, ruled by the ominously vague ‘Empire’, Waiting for the Barbarians follows the Magistrate (played by Grant Swanby) as his rather peaceful world is upended when the Third Bureau arrives with warnings of an attack from the land’s natives, known as the barbarians.  Suspicions, paranoia and hatred are fed and flamed, and quickly an imaginary war is born.  The Magistrate, his intentions unknown to himself, takes in a barbarian girl (Chuma Sopotela) left crippled and alone by the Third Bureau’s torturers, and painfully tries to work through his feelings for her, and more generally for ‘the other.’  

Having read and adored Coetzee’s novel in university, I wish that Marine’s adaptation would have dramatized more and narrated less.  The first person voice of the Magistrate in the closed-circuit world of the book created an intimacy with the reader that highlighted the protagonist’s searching and introspection, his uncertain humanity.  Narration on stage, almost pro forma, feels much more declarative and assured; relying so heavily on it created a lack of vulnerability in the Magistrate (which perhaps could have been compensated for a bit more in Swanby’s performance).  Often the character narrated his own actions even while performing them, which created a tedious and unnecessary doubling.  The usual troubles of adapting a literary form into a dramatic one are also more generally on display here.  The script sometimes lapses into a rather breathless ‘get through the plot’ mode; and finding a more compact climax would have added impact, and taken length from the second act.

The set, designed by Craig Leo, is abstract, dynamic and versatile.  Sheets of plexi-glass smeared with white paint interrupt rows of narrow wooden slats in a clear juxtaposition of the ‘modern’ and the ‘primitive’.  And above all this, hang tangles of jagged glass pieces and metal strips – conjuring the image of a sky in shards.  The set’s many elements, textures and materials, manipulated and played with throughout, allowed for the creation of some very stirring and powerful imagery (especially in serving the play’s motif of washing).

At times the piece felt like it lost its footing between investigating fraught power dynamics – like the objectification of women – and reiterating them.

The staging was varied, and included several interpretive movement/dance sequences that often leant intrigue and (sometimes even) magic to the piece.  However, these moments could also feel quite jarring or indulgent, and weren’t always that narratively useful.  Marine is sometimes given to moments of blocking that are purposely disconnected from the action and thus feel rather smug, or to instances of over-sexualization that wind up feeling hackneyed and gratuitous.  These recalled similar frustrations I had with his production of Dangerous Liaisons.  Imagery is often of the blunt variety too – shiny blood-red hammers, and plastic mannequin body parts –  all designed to hit you, but into what it’s not always clear.

The primarily South African cast is uniformly strong in performance, but Chuma Sopotela is eminently watchable and particularly compelling in the role of the Girl. Quiet scenes between Sopotela and Swanby are the richest and most magnetic in the play.  Kimbely-Anne Laferriere delivers an inexplicably thin performance as Zoe, the prostitute that the Magistrate visits.

At times the piece felt like it lost its footing between investigating fraught power dynamics – like the objectification of women – and reiterating them. An implicit risk perhaps in having scantily clad women onstage (and then making them shake their butt for as long as possible).

The play’s real world relevance is indisputably abundant, from the fantasies of weapons of mass destruction to the indelible images of Abu Ghraib. Our failure to grasp ‘the other’, beyond simply using them as a means to define ourselves, is a universal and enduring human dilemma.  Waiting for the Barbarians insists that there is always pending violence in our obsessively oppositional thinking, in our inability to recognize that clear dualities, though we desperately crave them, can never be true.   

Waiting For The Barbarians runs to February 17