RHETORICAL To Play Stratford Circus, Oct 2014

Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom is the award winning, prolific South African playwright whose critically acclaimed play RHETORICAL is being performed at London Stratford Circus from October 14th-18th as part of Afrovibes UK. Five actors portray multiple characters in this exploration of the art of persuasion using the words of Thabo Mbeki who was President of South Africa from 1999 to 2008.

"This is a satirical piece that tries to examine Mbeki's speeches and his days in cabinet," explains Grootboom. "Although structured like a biography, it is not a biography but a series of sketches/skits that concerns itself mostly with what local people thought of Mbeki and whimsically seeks to examine whether he was any good as a president. The question it asks is 'was he better than Mandela or was that too high a standard to try to emulate?'

"The play lampoons the fact that Mbeki, although more educated and academic than the old man, was too concerned with this question, and ended up alienating the people where Mandela won them over. It deals with his frustration at being compared to Mandela, even as he believes that the fantasy of "a Mandela" was made by him and the whole ANC publicity machine (after all, it is said that even when Mandela was President, he was merely a ceremonial president and that it is Mbeki who was doing all the work behind the scenes - it is also said that he wrote Mandela's key speeches). In the end, it is a comedy about - as one character in the play argues - "an African who was educated in the West and was so taken over by Western thought and mannerism that he spent his whole time in Cabinet trying to prove to everybody that he is an African". The humorous part about this idea is when you consider that his most famous speech was "I am an African".

Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom was born in Meadowlands, Soweto in 1975, were he was raised by his grandparents. As a youngster he moved to Garankuwa, north of Pretoria to live with his aunt and, through school, developed a passionate interest in the works of Shakespeare, particularly King Lear which quickly became his favourite play. In 2005 he received the National Standard Bank 'Young Artist Award' and in the same year won the Naledi Theatre Award for his play 'Relativity: Township Stories' (2004) which was co-written with Presley Chweneyagae, the star of this year's production of 'Rhetorical'. 'Township Stories' toured the UK in 2006.

"Rhetorical is in many ways about the end of one world and the beginning of another. If Mandela is Jesus, then former president Thabo Mbeki is St Paul, the theorist and the real architect of Christianity. It's not Mandela's but Mbeki's fingerprints that are all over the post-1994 project..."

Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom writing in the Guardian in 2010: "The problem with South Africa is that we made too smooth a transition to democracy. All the toxic effects of apartheid, the tensions between the different races, were swept under the carpet in a bid - by the magnanimous Nelson Mandela and others - to create a new utopia (the "rainbow nation")...Apartheid was too successful. Black people, whether they know it or not, are still trying to deal with its legacy. And white people fail to understand why most black people still can't forget about apartheid when our leaders preached reconciliation. But black people were denied economic freedom for many years, they were denied educational freedom and were moved to townships and homelands. Of course some of us will try to make the best of a bad situation, but what about those who can't? Can they be blamed? People were given freedom after 1994, but what use is freedom when you don't have the means to live freely? When you have been raised in a controlled environment that denied you the right to proper education? When all the wealth of the country was denied you?"

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