This is an irresistibly warm and impulsive Christmas double-bill from South African company Isango/Portobello. Adapter and director Mark Dornford-May transforms two classic European fairy tales – the first moral, didactic, and be-sprigged with giant Dickensian roast geese and snowflakes; the second, similarly sentimental, with the attendant Mozartian discomforts of Masonic pageantry and a musical tendency to mince. Dornford-May and company strip them of this old regalia, and fill them with warm percussive slaps and claps, a cappella voices, and a Marimba orchestra (of giant xylophones) which brings the rhythm of joy and the timbre of sunlight into these wintry fables.
Hugely dignified opera singer Pauline Malefane is the performative centrepiece, playing first Scrooge, and then the Queen of the Night. In ‘Ikrismas Kherol’ she oppresses her fellow men by being the big bad boss of a gold mine (Dickens’ appeal on behalf of the poor being re-set in township South Africa). In the opening scene, Scrooge’s miners – only the lights on their pit-helmets visible – descend from the dark rafters like so many booted and hammering stars. The gumboot-smacking glee, optimism and protest of their opening chant is one of the best moments of a hugely spirited ‘A Christmas Carol’: the spirit of collective involvement makes even the long video projections which supply Scrooge’s backstory as a township orphan, opportunities for the whole ensemble to tut, comment, and breathe dramatic life into a format which can often feel flat. And the moment where the lovely open-faced Tiny Thembisa (Poseletso Sejosingoe) is possessed by the cadaverous spirit of Marley, billowing in his business suit on the top balcony, while his voice booms from her lips, is genuinely scary and hugely imaginative.
With ‘The Magic Flute’, the collective spirit of the company is more consistently summoned up by the hybrid music – Mozart’s frilly cadenzas sound truly festive when they have the warm, clean, clear sound of struck wood or glass bottles beneath them. Malefane comes into her own as the evil Queen of the Night, sweeping the stage imperiously in huge feathered skirts, her frigid arpeggios rising even higher than her petrified strands of hair.
Philisa Sibeko’s Pamina is sweet, powerful, and warrior-like, more heroic than her tender and diffident hero Prince Tamino (Mhlekazi Andy Mosiea). And their rite of passage in the domain of Pamina’s father (invested with a beautifully calm tribal dignity by Simphiwe Mayeki) again becomes genuinely dramatic because of the concerned, advisory, heartfelt interest of everyone on stage (including the musicians). The other element which makes this truly enchanting for children and adults is Leigh Bishop’s costume design which, like the music, verges colourfully beyond kitsch through high opera, R&B and traditional South African styles. Good spirits appear in trios, clad in baby-doll nighties with matching pink teddy-bears; Jackie O suits and angel wings; floor-length gowns and giant Afros. When the bird-catcher Papageno (played with hugely rounded pathos and buffoonery by Zamile Gantana) calls his birds, they preen and nestle behind him, an enticing ring of girls in silky pink tracksuits with ‘BIRD’ spelled out in diamante on their rears. This is warm, collective, universally accessible, musical magic.
