What makes or breaks a home? And how can the act of remembering be a means of healing rather than a form of bondage? In Phinda Ubuyele, two siblings attempt to make sense of their pasts, navigating a murky landscape of trauma and distorted memory, passed down through generations.
Directed by Thembela Madliki, the play is performed by Siphosethu Balakisi and Xolela Kenene who play Thando and her older brother Luntu, respectively. While trauma and memory are the overt themes charging the work, there is also the abstract and corporeal – notions of tenderness and violence held and harboured on a cellular level.
Back in their childhood home following the death of their parents, they engage the way siblings do, playing and bickering. Each interaction, though, is steeped in their shared personal histories, seeing them traverse emotional and temporal sites as they go along. Over the course of the play, they invoke their anxious and ailing mother, and their abusive and overbearing father, switching between modes of performance with ease.
Importantly, they are accompanied by a series of domestic objects. They are ordinary items – a bucket, a stove-top iron, a broom, a hat – but it is the way that they are activated throughout the performance that allows the themes of Phinda Ubuyele to be so effectively translated. In the capable hands of Balakisi and Kenene, they become mnemonic devices, evoking vital narratives and experiences. A blanket, bundled up and cradled, channels a mother’s love and concern. A hat, tilted just right, recalls a father’s cruel and taciturn nature.
Towards the front of the stage sit three gilded objects: A door handle, a teacup and a picture frame. In their stillness they are like small installations, artefacts of remembrance. Once held, they become shrewd tools, excavating past and present simultaneously.
“Remembering doesn’t mean I’m stuck in the past,” says Thando. It’s a simple line, but it gestures towards an essential concept in the play. Trauma is cyclical, posits Phinda Ubuyele, and memory is seldom static, never limited to the past. Left unresolved, it can rise like a spectre to trouble the present.
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