Writer and performer Selina Thompson’s breakthrough came with her solo show ‘Salt.’, a brilliant and uncomfortable piece of autobiographical docu theatre about the white gaze and her arduous experience sailing the route of the old Transatlantic slave triangle. Deeply personal, it clearly took its toll on Thompson as she ceded the spotlight for its final tour, with an actor performing in her place.
‘Twine’ is not technically the follow up to ‘Salt.’, but I believe it is the first thing Thompson has done since then to play in a theatre, with projects in between including various community works and a Missy Elliot-themed schools show.
Like ‘Salt.’, ‘Twine’ feels personal. Unlike the agonisingly direct ‘Salt.’, ‘Twine’ is drenched in distancing mechanisms. Thompson does not herself appear, although she is implicitly there as a presence. Performers Muki Zubis, Nandi Bhebe and Angelina Chudhi are constantly referring to an unseen writer called Sycamore, who has split into three as a result of her soul-searching over her adoption: she had divided into them, three aspects of herself called Bark, Seed and Sapling.
It is a story about adoption, and how Sycamore’s three selves gradually get to grip with the facts of her early childhood, when she was taken in and raised by a new family following the death of one of her siblings.
As well as the text, Thompson’s other big contribution is programme notes that make it clear that she is a child of adoption, but also stressing the show isn’t specifically autobiographical.
That may be the case, but one assumes that most of the musings the trio have are in line with Thompson’s own views, in a show that is in many ways an old-school work of agitprop, using artsy skits and disarming humour to make often-incendiary points about the adoption system. Some of it is genuinely enraging, especially when Bhebe takes on the persona of an obnoxious social worker and explains how much cheaper adoption is for the state than social care, and the considerable imperative to get kids adopted by new families while they’re too young to remember their old ones.
Nonetheless, I think Thompson has landed on a clumsy format, albeit one stylishly realised by Jennifer Tang. I understand why Thompson didn’t want to do a big soul-baring solo piece with her centre stage. But it feels so personal that it sort of comes across like that anyway except hidebound by a piecemeal and sometimes didactic format. When Bark floats the idea that it might be better to abandon the family unit as a concept entirely, it’s kind of difficult to know what to make of that and whether it’s a passing thought of Thompson’s or something she’s actually arguing.
These issues might have been more usefully discussed either via the clarity of a ‘Salt.’-style piece, or a much more conventional narrative drama. Charismatic performances and a palpable sense of feeling give ‘Twine’ a raw power, but I was left with the sense of a writer with something important to say, but unwilling to adopt the dramatic language to actually say it.