Review: The Salt Lesson, intriguing and complex

The Salt Lesson, the new play by Sbuja (Sibuyiselo) Dywili is on in the Baxter Studio as part of the 2025 Baxter Theatre’ Zabalaza Festival. I was at the opening performance last night, March 17. There was a performance today, March 18 at 10am and there is one tonight at 7pm. There are two more performances tomorrow, March 20 at 4pm and 4pm.  Mindful of the short run, here is a quickie review, an alert to go and see this intriguing play. There was an ovation at the opening, with a hugely responsive audience. The audience was almost a participant – talking back to the characters – as if it was part of the conversation on stage.

The premise of the play, its narrative conceptual arc is brilliant. An aging older man, Ivan van der Lith (Adrian Galley) is losing his mind as dementia takes hold of his faculties. He was in a facility for aged care but when that was no longer tenable, his sister (Megan Choritz) brings him home – to what was once his home – the farm – now owned by his son. His son happens to be Black. The narrative set in South Africa in 2019 is framed against a backdrop of killings of farm owners – White owners. The hallucinating Ivan flips between remembering his beloved son, Miracle as he recalls him and the intruder as he sees him, in his house, grabbing his land/farm.

Likho Mango plays the young Chris/Miracle and Thapelo Tharaga takes on the role of adult Chris, battling to save his farm from the bank and his estranged father’s demons. Miracle flies a paper kite that his dad has made him. As Sbjua has remarked, the play “asks profound questions: What does it truly mean to be forgotten? What does it mean to forget?” There is a lot to unpack. It is complex and complicated. It is a heart breaking story of a family, a family broken by circumstances (Apartheid) and personal choices. If one cannot recall what happened, then what does that mean for the people like Chris, dealing with the Ivans of this world. It is a double whammy for Chris.  The Ivans of this world tend to duck behind selective amnesia and when there is dementia, well, you try and reason with that lot. Good luck. Your anger will be like hitting a brick wall and we see this in the play – vividly – and tragically.

I feel that some of the writing could be pruned, tweaked and shaped further. When I attended the opening of the Zabalaza Festival event, snippets of the festival plays were staged. Several people remarked that they found the accents of the van der Liths to be problematic. Ivan and Wendy speak in with small town poor white Afrikaans accents, which feed into stereotyping tropes. Watching last night and I did feel that the accents trivialise and stereotype these protagonists.

I would like to see the magical realism heightened and taken further. Ivan’s memories and young Miracle with his paper kite and music could be extended. I would also like to see the leitmotif of salt being taken further in the staging, activating of the space with more physical theatre and lighting  to amplify the hallucinations of Ivan and the overlapping  perceptions of ‘reality’ by the protagonists. The Salt Lesson is one of the most interesting new South African plays that I have seen in a long time and I hope that it will be staged again. To reiterate, the conceptual/narrative arc is brilliant with protagonists who invite us to contemplate ourselves deeply and that is what great theatre does. Bravo to Sbuja for gifting us the Salt Lesson.

✳ Featured image -Adrian Galley and Likho Mango in The Salt Lesson by Sibuyiselo Dywili, at the Baxter Studio in Cape Town, March 17-21 as part of 2025 The Baxter Theatre’s Zabalaza Festival