The Rhodes Drama department produced Rubber to represent the university at the National Arts Festival this year. However, it was not well in festival newspaper Cue, which argued the play "lacks a sense of conceptual or directorial coherence," and "gradually disappears into a confused space."
The Rhodes Drama department produced Rubber to represent the university at the National Arts Festival this year. However, it was not well in festival newspaper Cue, which argued the play "lacks a sense of conceptual or directorial coherence," and "gradually disappears into a confused space."
In what may be its final performance at Best of Fest, Rubber was revised for student viewing.
The director, Robert Haxton maintains it was Cue that was confused. Incoherence – what he calls a sense of "wrongness" – was precisely the point of the piece.
Set on an isolated Karoo farm, a nearby rubber factory is presented as the producer of the contagion that infects the characters with a wretched and debilitating cruelty, but later it’s not clear if the factory is the problem. The rising number of dead family members look on from a bench in the backdrop, but the ghosts’ vengeance may also not be the problem. Rubber mannequins follow the actors through the bricks and frames like shadows; they dance like the crows that haunt the place, but they fall away towards the end. The guitars with their gaunt twangs are real and on stage, played by silent witnesses, but the music is there to further disjoint, not harmonise. Alone and starving, the characters don’t fully grasp what is going on, and neither do the audience.
“The basis behind the piece was to throw the audience into this thriller-based situation where they would feel something constantly on point, but the fact that they don’t know everything that is going on is what keeps them there,” says Haxton.
“And it’s also what keeps them talking about it afterwards for a long time and not being able to let it go: because their imaginations get too overrided.”
The tone of the work is deliberately disruptive: Haxton compares it to “adding a drop of morphine into a large thai curry, or injecting air into a person’s bloodstream.”
It’s a feeling exemplified by a scene where families members attempt to strangle one another before being rescued by the maid, who in easily parting the contorting figures makes ‘kss kss’ noises as one would to a dog.
Audience member Candice Gawler described it as, “Confusing, but not in a bad way. Profound. I feel frightened,” while fellow viewer Chloe Hirschman said, “Amazing, but disturbing.”
