Woza Albert! The Market Theatre, Johannesburg Hull Truck Theatre By Steve Hall

Anyone leaving Monday's Audience with Joan Bakewell feeling that the event was perhaps little dry and overly controlled, will have found the perfect, explosive, high-octane antidote in Tuesday's brilliant Woza Albert! This two man production was a furious singing, dancing, spinning, shouting, spitting atomic blast of theatre, G-forcing a laughing and applauding audience from left to right in their seats with sheer power and momentum.

The play itself was hugely fluidic with actors Peter Mashigo and Errol Ndotho leaping in and out of countless characters to paint a zigzagging narrative which imagines the second coming of Christ (addressed as 'Morena') to an apartheid-ridden South Africa. Everyone has a response to the arrival of Morena - from the overworked, underpaid black brickmakers of the Coronation Brickyard (who plan to ask Morena to make bricks rain from the sky so they don't have to work so hard), to the white president (who's response involves teargas), to the men queuing for days at the pass office on Albert Street (the title of the play literally means - Rise Up Albert) to gain work permits just so they can beg for employment at the car windows of passing white people.

Morena inevitably becomes and enemy of South Africa's white ruling class and faces arrest in one of the plays funniest and most telling moments - as an army of police close in, a single frightened worker from the Coronation Brickyard prepares to defend the son of god with a lead pipe. Morena speaks and the worker turns to him with a look of total astonishment: "Forgive them, they know not what they do? They do know Morena, yes they do know."

There is already talk of Woza Albert! returning for another performance. I really hope it does so more people in the city get a chance to see this great and important play. I'll certainly be in the audience again, and I'll be doing my best to persuade everyone I know to come along too. In fact, if there's anything at all in word of mouth, the return of Woza Albert! will sell out weeks in advance. My advice? Keep your eyes peeled for the announcement and put Hull Truck on speed dial, because, trust me, you don't want to miss this.

Continued on www.thisisull.com...... The Humber Mouth Homepage.

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