Review: MLUNGU at Toneelhuis

MLUNGU is a political satire, a stand-up cabaret and a rebuke of white privilege. Well, yes, technically it's all of these things, but it's also none of them. Shannon Hendry's 50-minute solo show, which she wrote and performs, is cultural commentary with nothing dry about it except the white bread.

I happened to see it on election day, which gave a few of the political jokes extra weight. When Hendry asks an audience member to choose an outfit, the options are a yellow T-shirt with green "corruption", an off-brand blue shirt or a red beret. On any given day, that choice needs no further explanation but on the day the country went to the polls, it was particularly pointed.

The central character is a privileged white woman, the mlungu of the title. She is desperate to prove her generosity and selflessness as one of the people of this country, and completely unwilling to change anything real. To that end, she carries a dead tree from white man to white man in the audience, looking for someone to nurture it.

This is less observational stand-up than character-driven conversation with the audience. Hendry is no song-and-dance merchant, either. Instead she uses ridiculous rhymes and nods to recognisably cheesy tunes to break up the narrative (such as it is) and keep the audience guessing about what comes next. In the end, the structure of the whole show satirises the state of the nation more sharply than any single joke or routine.

The format has its risks, and there were moments of awkward silence from the audience. Hendry handled them like a seasoned stand-up, never flustered and never letting the energy drop. She's also quick on her feet. The line that tickled me most, and one I may well adopt, was an off-the-cuff question: do gay South Africans feel like superior South Africans because they have two rainbows in them?

Kalene Botha on keyboard is a lovely foil to Hendry's antics. She's silent apart from the music, though, and I felt more could have been made of that relationship. The occasional lighting effect is well timed to Hendry's delivery and adds to the comedy of surprise.

MLUNGU is part of Hendry's master's research into South African comedy, performative political satire and nation-building, and it sometimes feels like a work in progress. But it's a promising one. More than 30 years into democracy, we often think we've heard it all when it comes to race, class and politics in this country. This show proves we haven't. Many surprising moments drew hearty laughs and spontaneous bursts of applause from the audience. In a country where the subject so often feels overdone, it's a genuinely fresh take on race relations and political satire.

The show is a good seed from which to grow her dead tree into something fuller and more polished. I'd love to see Hendry develop it further, and to see how much harder she pushes the boundaries as her research goes on. The Cape Town run may be over, but this is one tree worth watching grow.