Seven Oaks Magazine.

As another, major example of an industrially advanced, multi-ethnic settler state, the symbolic national figure of South Africa seems to loom large in the Canadian political and cultural consciousness, heedless of race and across ideological spectra: white conservatives always cite the concerns of their ‘South African’ constituents when arguing against ‘special’ Native hunting and fishing rights, while, conversely, aboriginal leader Matthew Coon Come used the anti-racist platform provided by the UN in Durban to denounce Canadian apartheid; Archbishop Desmond Tutu was in Vancouver last year to receive an honourary degree from Simon Fraser University, and there are plans to bring him back to the city next spring; Palestine solidarity activists here, this writer among them, have sported t-shirts boldly imprinted with the message “Amandla Intifada!” In Vancouver, one is often running into white-skinned South African ex-pats, like the one who told me that the country is “a place to be coming from, not going to; we’re all fleeing – like rats, fleeing from a sinking ship.”

It was with some trepidation, then, that I watched the stage lights rise on the minimalist set of The Syringa Tree, written and performed by Johannesburg-born Pamela Gien, a white woman who refers to South Africa as “the paradise lost into which [she] was born.” Any worries that I had about apartheid-era nostalgia, though, faded as I – along with the rest of a packed house that leapt into a sustained standing-ovation as the house lights rose again at the end of 100 hypnotic minutes – was taken in by the enormity of Gien’s talent for powerfully expressing the comic, tragic, familiar, foreign, familial and political components of life in a complex and dehumanizing society.

The Syringa Tree follows in the tradition of Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys, examining the personal as well as social dimensions of apartheid South African through the circumscribed perspective of a privileged, sheltered child. Young Elizabeth, our narrator, is referred to lovingly as “Monkey” by her various black caretakers, her favourite of whom, Salamina, early on gives birth to a child with no pass, who stays illegally with the her mother in the servants’ quarters of the family’s house (this, like the later murder of Elizabeth’s grandfather at the hands of a revolutionary from Zimbabwe, is part of the autobiographical element upon which the fictional portions of Gien’s narrative rest). Elizabeth’s father Isaac is an atheistic Jewish doctor who does all in his power to avoid the religious Afrikaners next door, while her mother, of British lineage, repeatedly commiserates about her daughter’s hyperactivity by wondering aloud if she has ears – we know, of course, that Elizabeth has been paying closer attention to her surroundings than her parents might think.

Good liberals opposed to the apartheid system, Elizabeth’s family nonetheless possesses a subtler, less pronounced or vituperative racism than their neighbours; their black servants are fed leftovers and are often dealt with paternalistically by the family, who use the offensive term ‘pick-a-ninny’ both as a descriptor for some blacks as well as a diminutive for their white daughter.

The mesmerizing fact of the Syringa Tree is that it is a one-person show: at a breath-taking, breakneck pace, Gien (or, on alternate nights, actor-dancer Caroline Cave) plays each of these roles herself, transforming voice, body and face in turn to connote the human, universal as well as particular characteristics of each of the people who make up Elizabeth’s South Africa. Picking up narrative pace – in terms of years spanned – towards the end of the piece, Gien ages the myriad characters masterfully, interweaving issues of emigration and diaspora as well as upheaval and revolution.

Directed by Larry Moss, with set, sound and lighting designed by Kenneth Foy, Tony Suraci, Steven B. Mannshardt (and assistant Ethan Hoernman) respectively, the production is sublimely crafted, with a subtlety that highlights Gien’s overwhelming charisma and magnetism onstage. Elizabeth’s wooden swing – ostensibly hanging from the titular Syringa – provides the only set piece, with varied lighting techniques employed to place Gien’s sundry characters in different settings. A recurring effect sheds shafted light against the back wall of the set, signifying Elizabeth’s obscured view of her environment, reminding us how little she (and those of us privileged enough to watch live theatre in Vancouver) could ever know of the real miseries that apartheid’s black victims knew, lived, and rose up against.

A triumphant and promising opener for the Playhouse’s 2005/06 season, The Syringa Tree runs until October 29.