Planet B – A New World
May 13, 2011
Directed by: Helen Iskander (The Famished Road, Baobabs Don’t Grow Here)
Performed By: Kyla Davis (ImpACT award winner for Theatre 2010)
Mongi Mthombeni (The Butcher Brothers, Golden Ovation Award
Winners 2010, Naledi Award winner Best Cutting Edge Production 2010)
In a Director’s Note that speaks, through words, as powerfully as the actors communicate through their performance, Helen Iskander reveals that “in this allegorical tale, we explore the theme of territory and what it means to have a home’.
In a seemingly post apocalyptic South Africa, Planet B is set ‘somewhere in the future’ and tells the story of a man: a recluse who has ‘invented a resourceful home for himself, but who suffers from terrible loneliness, and the nomad, who has built a protective wall around herself to survive, but who lost the ability to feel’.
Due to climate change, the world has completely altered into a beautifully imagined desolate landscape and, thus, the two characters we see live a lifestyle that has drastically devolved from the one we live now.
Through this deteriorated existence, we see real interaction based on the immediacy of the need for food, shelter, cleanliness and companionship.
Stripped of social niceties and material possessions, we are taken to the core and confronted with what actually makes us human.
We see that the need to accumulate wealth and possessions, the need to be ‘bigger, better, higher, stronger, faster’, are not important and are in fact detrimental to our wellbeing and the wellbeing of the environment around us.
Helen Iskander poignantly demonstrates how, by dissolving our individual egos, we are able to live and exist with the earth, in companionship with it and other beings rather than compete against it.
Planet B is a performance where incredible technical performance skill meets simple yet finely detailed design elements that allow the characters’ world to be wonderfully envisioned by the audience.
Those elements merge to drive home the message of sustainability, of climate change and compassion with a magnitude and heart that is rarely seen in performance today.