THE GARAGE SALE. Directed by Tara Notcutt, with Kim Cloete, Stefan Erasmus and Carel Nel. At the Artscape Arena theatre, Tuesday to Friday at 7.30pm, and Saturday at 3pm and 7.30pm. STEYN DU TOIT reviews.
SORTING through a deceased loved one’s belongings must simultaneously be one of the most traumatic and therapeutic rituals we can ever undertake as humans. While each item dumped in a box marked “donate” or “sell” brings with it another cold reminder of the finality of death, those artifacts we decide to keep also allow us to seek comfort in the memory of the time we were fortunate enough to be able to spend with that person.
Taking our seats before the start of the play, we find a brother and sister packing up their childhood home in Rafiek Mammon’s The Garage Sale. It’s Friday night, both of their parents are dead, and they have a lot to do before handing over the keys to the house’s new owners on Monday morning.
Carrying boxes in and out of the garage, they appear rather jolly at first while considering items of clothing, pot plants, cutlery and photo albums to the sound of Lauren Hill and Blackstreet blaring on the radio.
Staged as the first production in this year’s Artscape Spring Drama Season, the plot takes its time establishing the complex relationship between Avril Williams (Cloete) and her younger brother, Mike (Erasmus). After their initial cheerfulness, we start to see the process take strain as a result of how different they are despite being siblings. He’s a cynical, gay, sexually liberated twenty-something pothead actor. She’s a seemingly level-headed, idealistic physiotherapist of 35 about to marry a doctor.
Against the backdrop of taping up boxes and pricing those unwanted items they are planning to sell the next morning, their vastly opposing views on various topics gradually begin to boil to the surface. Life after death, whether superstitions are scientifically valid, the possibility of karma and the merits of committing oneself only to one sexual partner, all of these important revelations are made through Mammon’s humorously sparring and banter-filled dialogue.
Already starting to scratch the surface without us even being aware of it, several clues – a solid-looking skillet, a sharp knife, the revelation of a harrowing event 20 years ago as well as a large chest referred to as “mother’s graveyard” – are also introduced into the fast-paced narrative. Under Notcutt’s direction this dark comedy will persist in picking at old scabs, revealing layer after emotional-character layer in the process, before coming to an end in a brutal finale.
But first, the unexpected arrival of Flip (Nel), a likeable aspirant actor with fascist tendencies surviving in the meantime by delivering pizzas, will provide a light-hearted tone to proceedings as well as a vehicle through which the viewer can further explore the siblings’ motivations.
Spanning Marcel Meyer’s unidealised set design – featuring a box-filled garage interior as well as a patio cluttered with broken chairs and garden grid fences – we learn that Flip is straight, that Mike lusts after him, and that Avril professes to be repulsed by him in a tone suggesting otherwise.
A production relying heavily on multilayered performances by its cast, Notcutt here again proves herself an intuitive theatremaker with a gift for staging personality-driven pieces. All three of the performers in The Garage Sale play real people. Flawed humans that hide behind their sharp tongues and exaggerated personas, but people nonetheless.
While we laugh with them, take offence at some of the things they say and feel repulsed by what we’ll witness them do before the show’s over, there is never a moment in which Notcutt does not make us retain our empathy for them.
Described as a play that “sardonically explores the darker, yet funnier side of Cape Town suburbia”, this is a highly entertaining theatrical experience that will have you laughing right up to the moment where it knocks the wind out of your sails. Driving home with the sound of a shovel against gravel by the end of it, wrapping your head around the final scene becomes more complicated the more you consider it’s implications.
l Tickets are R55 to R90. Call Computicket at 0861 915 8000, or see www.computicket.com to book.