Crossing is an old-fashioned mystery story in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe, but given an original twist by the intuitive writing of multi-award winning Afrikaner dramatist Reza de Wet.
Her play is set in a spiritual limbo where the physical and mystical mingle in a riverside guesthouse kept by two weird sisters. One is a stern, po-faced governess who has inherited unspecified powers from the mother, while her downtrodden hunchbacked sibling salvages and buries the dead who perish in the river. Into this scenario step a shape-shifting hypnotist and his sexually exploited assistant. Together they tantalise the servile sister by suggesting her hunch harbours wings.
De Wet lends her characters stage life by focusing on their interdependent power relationships. But, more than this, she seeks to map out a poetic, largely internal landscape in pursuit of a wider, more mythical status, lulling you into a familiar world with archetypal, even clichéd, characters. She then seeks to transform them with a visionary logic of her own. This involves some humour, with lines like, "I'm good to you: I stroke your hump when it aches." But the play sets its sights on a serious psychological epiphany at the end.
Chris Hayes's atmospheric production steadily swims the treacherous currents of ghoulish pretension and schlock melodrama. On Cleo Pettit's sepia set of rugs and antiques, this is, therefore, an absorbing voyage into a murky psychological underworld. Leading the way, Vanessa Mildenberg presents a joyless governess whose authority is challenged by Warren Kimmel's showman hypnotist. More interesting are the play's minions in the form of Elizabeth Hopley, as the hypnotist's childlike assistant, and Clare Bloomer, as the hunchback, dreaming of another dimension. It is an agreeably transporting experience - if you have a mind to go with the eddying flow.
Crossing
