Red Aloes

Memory - the nebulous nature of fragments and erasures - how we grapple to recover or reconstruct a sense of our stories, is at the core of this play. It is memory which is at best drawn from a palimpsest - a fugue of what happened to his mother: facts and maybes; conspiracy theories, erasures and who-knows what.

“The play centres around the topic of memory; idea of memory being fragile; being boxed away. Being susceptible to irreversible change if contradicting facts are attached to them.

“This relationship to memory as well as the fact memory can be driven by the senses and images led us to create the play using an image-rich language.”

The details of his mother’s death were sidelined in the transition period in South Africa - from apartheid to democracy. We may glibly say that the story was “lost in transition”, but that doesn’t begin to address the trauma, dislocation and ruptures.