| What: An Apprenticeship with Sorrow Written and performed by: Sara Matchett and Nina Callaghan Directed by: Lwanda Sindaphi Video and projection design: Nicola Pilkington Sound design: ย Mangaliso Ntekiso and Sara Matchett Installation set: Sara Matchett, Nina Callaghan and Lwanda Sindaphi Where: Theatre Arts, Observatory, Cape Town When: July 1-6, 2025 ย Bookings: https://theatrearts.co.za/show/apprenticeship_with_sorrow ย |
An Apprenticeship with Sorrow is premiering in Cape Town, at Theatre Arts July 1-6, 2025. Sara Matchett and Nina Callaghan have written and perform in this lyrical, emotionally charged and beautiful piece of theatre, with dementia of parents as its sentinel gate-keeping image. Memory, ritual, play and humour bring about healing and release in a deeply personal and emotionally charged narrative. It is also a deeply universal narrative which jangles and clanks out loudly in our demented world. Direction is by Lwanda Sindaphi.
Illness and loss has been part of Matchett and Callaghan lives. They have both lost siblings โ they died young from protracted illness. Way back in 1994, they were introduced by Caroline Calburn. She felt that it would be great for them to meet so they could support each other regarding their siblings and navigating the terrain of extended illness, loss and grief. They become friends and that led to marriage and a life partnership. Their love for each other sustained them when they each lost a parent to dementia. Full circle and they are staging their offering, An Apprenticeship with Sorrow at Theatre Arts, the fiercely independent theatre operated by Calburn. She is its artistic director and here is a piece of theatre birthed by individuals that she introduced to each other. See pop-up interview here: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/16g5nwcVVQ/
An Apprenticeship with Sorrow is not simply a bricolage of their experiences of sorrow. They have used Francis Wellerโs Five Gates of Grief prompts as a frame, a lens to structure their narratives into a play. In the programme note, Callaghan writes that they turned for โguidance and supportโ to Weller (a psychotherapist, grief scholar and practitioner) when they became interested in the โlandscape of lossโ. His concept of the Five Gates of Grief provides an โunderstanding loss as an individual, planetary and generational process โฆ a framework that reconnects the individual to their own life, to the wider social life, the more-than-human world and the spirit world of ancestry.โ
In Apprenticeship, Wellerโs Five Gates of Grief, the prompts, are beamed onto a projection screen on the stage: Everything we love we will lose, The Places that have not known love, The Sorrows of the World, What we expected and did not receive and Ancestral Grief.
In tandem with Wellerโs Five Gates of Grief are drawings, artwork and photos by Matchett and Callaghanโs parents, threaded with animation by Nicola Pilkington. The projection screen is a wonky circle, earth like space, a shape made up of plumbing pipes. There is a jagged outline to the circle of life. This is not an AI generated circle which has been extruded by machine. Calico has been stretched across the surface of this wobbly, jagged earth-circle. Images, flickering with animated sequences play out, high above the heat down below, on the scorched and demented, wasted earth.
Within the armature of Wellerโs Gates, Matchett and Callaghan weave their narratives of loss and grief as they position themselves within theatrical gate way frames on the stage. The loss of their siblings figure in their stories but it is the journey of dementia of their parents which is foregrounded. Dementia becomes a visceral and heart breaking metaphor for the world. The demented world โ climate change, wars and conflicts – is the leitmotif of Apprenticeship. Intersecting with the demented body of the world is the dementia of Matchett and Callaghanโs parents. The worldwide dementia and amnesia becomes a character in this play, transcending metaphor.
Through physical theatre, fable (the Vulture holding up the hot sun to protect the earth), story, breath, song, visuals and animation, Matchett and Callaghan take us on a rousing journey to the tipping point, when maybe blue pills may be a panacea or may explode on the floor in the detritus, the wasteland of the stuff that is the landfill of our lives and of those who have passed. What do we do with all the stuff that remains when loved ones have departed? How do we process and distil an everlasting presence from their absence?
The set โ an installation โ is a wasteland of discarded broken appliances (toaster, kettle, keyboards), family treasures (first baby shoes kept by a parent), bones etc- is the gate โ the reception arena through which the artists excavate their stories and draw us in by inviting us to smile and remember the quirks of their parents.
I loved the use of what I would call a mode of narrative documentary transfigured into magical realism. Matchett and Callaghan, under the articulated and tender direction of Lwanda Sindaphi, enter into a fictional conversations with their parents. Matchett to her mom โ โHow did it feel to lose cognition? How did it feel to lose independence, to come live with us?โ Matchett and Callaghan couldnโt have these conversations with their parents but through the alchemy of the ritual of theatre, they can. In doing so they honour their parents; memory, the connections through family and ancestry.
There is a deep sense of bearing witness to the loneliness and frustrations of protracted illness โ of dementia. It is theatre of witness with Matchett and Callaghan carving out a language, deep inside their narratives, to try and make sense from the body as a whole โ physical, emotional and the body of our burning demented world. The script is exquisitely crafted with writing which pops across the wasteland of the space: โI lost you when you lost time but you were still thereโ. I think there is the invitation to have conversations with those who are going through protracted illness, while they can; while you can. That is โ if they want to โ not everyone wants to. If not, well, there are other ways to heal, to repair. Become an apprentice to sorrow- remembering โ cherishing โ laughing, communing โ in the safe space of the theatre. A must experience play.
โ An Apprenticeship with Sorrow, written and performed by Sara Matchett and Nina Callaghan, directed by Lwanda Sindaphi, Theatre Arts, Cape Town, July 1-6, 2025. Pics: Roger Saner. Supplied.
