Our Lady of Benoni

Through five colourful characters, three of them living out their very individual lives in an unnamed public park in Johannesburg, Zakes Mda explores the plight of women and children in a patriarchal and male-dominated twenty-first century world.

Lord Stewart mourns his virginal companion (and regrets he didn’t try a little harder to change her state). He turns to another virgin, the eponymous Lady of Benoni, to help him find his lost love. Professor mourns the loss of his wife, Thabisile, humiliated and driven out of her community because she was believed not to have been a virgin before her marriage. MaDlomo mourns the fate of her child, raped as a three-month-old by a man seeking a cure for his HIV-positive state. And running in the background is the court case of a spiritual leader accused of rape and defended by the indomitable MaDlomo because of his support for the reintroduction of virginity testing.

Stylistically adventurous and unafraid to deviate from conventionally accepted norms, Mda is iconoclastic in his handling of the ways in which attitudes to power, superstition, ethics and sex are constructed. The discourse of patriarchy and its ‘regime of truths’ that define female sexuality, its obligations and its custodianship, are the focus of the play.

Zakes Mda’s satire is a kaleidoscopic display of the extremes to which men (and by implication women) are prepared to go in terms of valuing what is ‘virginal’. Mda presents us with the consequences of transgression: that which is seen as polluted and judged to be dangerous to the good health and purity of a group, a society, a culture. Taboos, superstition, customs and moral ethics become the subjects of inquiry and are, at times, subjected to ribald satire. This play cuts into a virtuoso style of theatre that can in no way be confused with the objectives and methods of conventional realism. Mda establishes a unique style and tone that is innovative, entertaining and challenging. It fuses satirical elements derived from classical poetry with a modernist sensibility that synthesises Brechtian and Absurdist features of theatricality, using characters as types and montage. Above all, in this work there is a profound exploration of what it means to operate in the politically charged landscape that defines...