Review: Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater is beautiful theatre of healing, restoration and hope

In Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater, Zenzile Maseko, a sixty-something grandmother is blithely told by an official at Home Affairs that she is not on the system. She is deceased. Dead. The Home Official with her pink nails taps her out and implores her to come back. With no living status, Maseko has no social security grant and no claim to any kind of benefit from her country. She may have been erased by officialdom, caught in a bizarre Kafkaesque landscape but she is very much alive. We laugh at the spectre of “pink nails” at Home Affairs at her computer, but this is not a funny story.

Maseko’s story unfurls as she processes and reckons with her days as a freedom fighter for South Africa. She was a Fire Eater aka an IFP assassin in Durban, in the 80s. [IFP -Inkatha Freedom Party –isiZulu IQembu leNkatha yeNkululeko]. In the lead up to the 1994 South African elections, this unassuming grandmother/Gogo was part of the IFP’s dreaded assassins (Impundulu/The lightning bird). From her cramped quarters in a women’s hostel in Durban, she tells us her story.

Co-written by Neil Coppen and Mpume Mthombeni of Empatheatre, Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater is an achingly beautiful theatre piece. Mthombeni delivers a performance which is transcendent – beyond being a ‘play’ on stage.  Empatheatre’s own publicity states that Mthombeni is a tour de force and that nails it. I cannot do better – than tour de force.  She is a triumph – holding us – the audience close to her as she invites and immerses us in her story.

I saw Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater, today, October 1 at Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees 2024. The audience gave the performance a prolonged standing ovation. The shows on the opening weekend of September 28 and 29 sold out. Woordfees is on until October 6 but there are no more performances of this play at the festival. I hope that this Naledi award winning play will be staged in Cape Town. It is stunning theatre.

In writing the play, Empatheatre drew widely from the lives and testimonies of women living in a Durban hostel, who contributed to an oral history project on migration, gender and inclusion run by the Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology. [See https://thecaperobyn.co.za/interview-empatheatre-south-africas-theatre-company-of-healing-changing-challenging-systems-and-igniting-vital-conversations/ and https://markettheatre.co.za/isidlamlilo-the-fire-eater/]

Mthombeni manifests this woman who has not only been forgotten for her service but has been erased by Home Affairs. Her identity has been deleted. However, it is not a pity party as she tells us and tries to tell herself: “You can’t do anything with pity. You can’t sell it. Can’t cook it.” Grounding Maseko and giving her the will to keep going; the possibility of returning to where she grew up and being able once again to pick fresh fruit and live off the land. In her hostel, she cares for a sapling which she hope to plant one day at home – away from her present nightmare. Embedded in her story as an assassin is the personal trauma she has had to endure as a woman and as a mother. She has watched her daughter deal with HIV and the devastation of that pandemic. She has overcome Covid. Nothing could kill her – even if Home Affairs thinks it can remove her from its identification system.

The exquisite design (lighting, set and sound) is a seamless part of the body of this work. The lighting design (Tina le Roux) and set design (Greg King) is like a membrane, an extension of this woman who is battling to make sense of her past, as she sits in this downtrodden hostel.

I have read that an impundulu, or “lightning bird” (the nickname of the IFP assassins) can ignite lightning and storms by flapping its wings. In the play, there is a constant crackle of lightening and rain – light and sound. At some points, I wondered if Maseko was going to lift off and fly away to another realm. Striking sound design by Tristan Horton. The production has a magic to it – magical realism – which transfigures beyond hard reality.

Maseko muses that she is a “life giver and life taker”. But she says we can’t change what is behind us. All we can do is go beyond “suffering and shame”. How does one process violence and terror – given and received? How does one emerge from being broken? It is not easy to have the strength to make good choices, to not perpetuate violence but it is the only way to move forward. Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater is beautiful theatre of healing, restoration and hope. Magnificent theatre – 90 minutes – pure magic.

✳ Mpume Mthombeni in Isidlamlilo/The Fire Eater, directed by Neil Coppen and co-written by Coppen and Mthombeni. Pic supplied by Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees 2024.