"Nothing much happens here" is a recurring verbal motif throughout Tshepang. It is ironic because what the play shows is that terrible things do happen in isolated and seemingly passive communities trapped by poverty, poor prospects and separation from the outside world. Now the outside world has come to see that the slip beneath civilization narrated as a single, fictional incident in Tshepang, is much more widespread than was previously thought. Little children experience violent sexual abuse from the earliest ages, and after the revelation in 2001 of what had happened to baby Tshepang, the cork came out of the bottle and story after story began to reveal the appalling truth. 
      Lara Foot Newton's starting point is the rape of the nine-month old baby, Tshepang, in 2001. At first it was thought six drunken men had gang-raped her, but it was later revealed they were innocent and that the culprit was her mother's current boyfriend. Though Newton closely bases her play on this real-life incident she distances her narration by making a fiction from the facts. This enables her excellent play, while appearing to be a simple story, very subtly to suggest an interpretation and understanding of what lay behind so horrific an incidient. Subtly the play tries to explain how could such a thing happen, and, so often? 
      Boredom is one thing Newton suggests. Young men, as Simon the main character relates, just into puberty (measured by the number of pubic hairs they have) are initiated into sex by a local whore managed by her pimp. The charge for her services is small, the main part of which includes a comic book which she reads while the young man is having sex with her. If she finishes the comic book before he is satisfied she order him off, but to satisfy the youths' final moments of desire her pimpl has conveniently placed a loaf of bread in a tree nearby. Simon adds wistfully he preferred the bread as the indifferent turning of the comic-book's pages rather turned him off. This debased initiation into sex without a trace of love or reciprocation became quickly associated with drunkenness and an gorwing sense of ennui. As Simon says, some say that boys will poke their penis into anything that has a hole. 
      Religion is not absent from the mix of causes. Christian values, a symbol here for all civilizing agnets, are represented by carved African nativity figures. But poignantly Simon points out that baby Jesus is a girl, since they are all waiting for the birth of Jesus's sister. We need her now, he says, as Jesus is too out of touch to be able to deal with current events. The girl Jesus will understand, but she has not yet come. She will also, Newton implies, generate a female-orientated religion that will stop the kind of male-satisfaction religion that prevails, and whose perversion can lead to the rape of a nine-month old baby. 
       The only contact with the outside world comes when the story gets into the press who turn up at this remote village with all their accompanying paraphernalia and superficiality. Only the story matters not the human results. Gerhard Max's suggestively minimal set represents the media by trees with dark glasses suspended on them and by pages of newspapers being spiked onto the branches. 
      This is a harrowing play made all the more poignant by its understatement. Simon, for whom the play is a long monologue except for the one word spoken by Ruth, tells the story: his story and that of Ruth, whose baby was the one raped before the play began. Mncedisi Shabangu's performance of Simon is a virtuoso piece of acting, and wholly riveting. 
      The play begins obliquely with Simon's picture of the sun-baked ennui that is his and the villagers' daily life. The sun's the heat breeds idleness and despair. Gradually he reveals some of the characters in the village, and later some of what they do. Then, bit by bit Newton manoeuvers Simon's narration to unravelling the incident itself and Shabangu's performance, becomes darker and angrier. 
      In one sense this is an undramatic play: two characters on stage, one alone speaking; but it is not. Newton makes Simon seem, at one level, simple by writing his monologue like the narration in a Homeric epic. He is the messenger reporting events that happen off-stage to other people. But on stage with him is Ruth, the child's mother, on whom the most devastating guilt has descended. At first she is seen frantically scrubbing the floor, possibly it seems at first grinding seed to make bread. But as the play unfolds her obsessive rubbing recalls Lady Macbeth trying to wipe blood off her hands. It is her way of talking, and like Christian in Pilgrim's Progress, she carries a burden physically represented by a bed - the child's bed, the place where she had sex, the beginning of her troubles. She is not without blame as she went off the tavern leaving her baby alone at her hut. That's when the rape happened. She had put a temporary respite from the drudgery of her life above the care of her baby, and the baby had paid the price, a price Ruth will never be able to pay. 
      But there is a glimmer of hope, of civilization, in the character of Simon. He has stood by Ruth, even though she has not spoken for three years. He cares for her, cajoles her, encourages her, without, it seems, any reward. He waits patiently for her to emerge from her private hell. He is the one who brings the love that neither baby Jesus nor the outside world can offer. 
      This play has two characters on stage. Ruth who speaks only one word but whose mime and expression constantly counterpoints Simon's narrative. Kholeka Qwabe terrifyingly conveys obsessed Ruth's guilt and obsession. 
      But the outstanding performance of the evening was Mncedisi Shabangu as Simon. Almost without our noticing it he regulates the intensity of the play like a symphony. The initial homely story-telling tone gives way in his voice, actions and looks to the much more harrowing reporting of the thing that happened where 'nothing happens'. It is a magnificent, utterly compelling performance made the more so by his average looks, slightly podgy build and expressive face. He looks on stage as though whatever the world can bring he has to face it. He is an Everyman, but rises above this. Such strength portrayed was Mncedisi's triumpant realisation of Simon in this most moving play. 
      This is a moving play whose epic narration lasting a little over an hour hides its subtleties and power in a simply told story. 'Nothing much happens here' says Simon. It sure does. 
      The play runs till 16th October. Don't miss it.
Roderick Swanston