{"id":4923,"date":"2022-10-22T13:34:07","date_gmt":"2022-10-22T12:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=4923"},"modified":"2022-10-22T13:35:39","modified_gmt":"2022-10-22T12:35:39","slug":"the-lesson-a-collective-fever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=4923","title":{"rendered":"The Lesson: A collective fever"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s all heat\nand burgeoning mania on the Mannie Manim stage. The rain is late to\nJohannesburg this year and the city has become unbearably hot and dry. Still, we\nare eager to see the Greg Homann adaptation of Eug\u00e8ne Ionesco\u2019s play The Lesson<\/em>, so we pack ourselves\ninto the stuffy theatre, trying not to brush up against one another too much.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nLesson <\/em>is set in\na small and insular university town (Makhanda, most likely) where a high school\nstudent (Lihle Ngubo) arrives at the home of a professor (Graham Hopkins) in\npreparation for her upcoming university entrance exam. They are familiar\ncharacters. He is the jaded and austere academic, and she is the keen and\nimpressionable student. He sits at one end of the table (indicated by the Union\nJack cushion) and she at the other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hopkins and Ngubo are a great team, maintaining the relentless pace the play demands, and deftly navigate its thematic twists and turns. In their best moments, they are able to hold entire conversations by playing with the tone and cadence of pedagogic jargon, which manages to go everywhere and nowhere all at once \u2013\u00a0 \u201cand so on and so forth, etcetera, etcetera!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here and there, when she\u2019s not fussing about in the garden\nor tidying up, Marie (Fiona Ramsay) passes through a scene, rummaging through\nthe sideboard or kicking pots and pans around in the kitchen. Although she doesn\u2019t\nfeature as much as the others, Ramsay is a vital and consistent dose of humour in\na story that oscillates wildly between playful absurdism and a more sinister surrealism.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seated at their respective ends of the table, the professor\nand student begin with basic arithmetic, and it all goes smoothly enough. It\u2019s\nwhen they reach subtraction that things begin to fall apart. As much as she\ntries, the student cannot grasp the concept. Again and again she gets the\nbasics wrong. For the professor, this is profoundly puzzling. For the audience,\nthis is both humorous and exhausting. We are being tested, we realise, trapped\nin some increasingly absurd dynamic that\u2019s growing more repetitive and\nnonsensical by the minute. By now, the heat in the theatre is palpable. We\nshift in our seats and endure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They move onto the history of language \u2013 fertile ground for\nabsurdism \u2013 and now the tone of the play is noticeably different. The student\nis suffering through a persistent and increasingly excruciating tooth ache and\nthe professor, indifferent to her pain, presses on, abandoning his makeshift\nlectern and standing on the dining room table to deliver his litany of non-sequiturs.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Above us, and all around us, spotlights have begun to\nilluminate a series of academic robes, rising up like spectres, even in their\nstillness. The effect is profound. As we watch the student struggle to grapple\nwith the futility of language, the burden of expectation and the heavy weight\nof history, the legacy of colonial education bears down on us, always.     <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pace picks up here and the dynamic between professor and\nstudent takes on a menacing tone. High, frantic moments drenched in red\npunctuate their interactions until we reach something of a collective fever-pitch\n\u2013 heat and pain and relentless sentiment \u2013 culminating in a sharp and sudden gesture,\nand a point of no return.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With its broader focus on the legacies of colonial education\nsystems, The Lesson <\/em>naturally  <\/em>makes\nsense on South African stages, but the script doesn\u2019t always reflect the realities\nand attitudes of those making their way through the contemporary South African education\nsystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In its effort to critique, albeit successfully, the stubborn\nhistories of privilege and power that have long-characterised academic\ninstitutions, The Lesson<\/em> leaves little room to highlight the vital work being\ndone by university and high school students (like the one in this play) to\ndecolonise and reimagine spaces of learning in the country.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nLesson<\/a> is on at The Market Theatre until Sunday 30 October 2022. <\/em>  <\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s all heat and burgeoning mania on the Mannie Manim stage. The rain is late to Johannesburg this year and the city has become unbearably hot and dry. Still, we … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":4925,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[10,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4923"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4923"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4929,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4923\/revisions\/4929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}