Please Try Again Later – A Review

Zimbabwe German Society, Harare

12 January 2018

Rudo Mutangadura’s disorienting drama about a grass widow searches for truth and perspective in the labyrinths created by a dystopian government

 The title is one that is familiar with Zimbabwe’s mobile users; the annoying nasal tones which tell you, you cannot get what you want there and then. But there is no further similarities with the work by writer Rudo Mutangadura and director Zaza Muchemwa. A culmination of the Almasi African Playwrights’ Conference, this was a staged reading with a difference. When I heard that the play was mostly going to take place in a Kombi, I prepared myself for a boredom fest. But right after Alice Tuan introduced the play and Chelsy Maumbe did the narration bit I was hooked and forgot it was a staged reading.

The lives of the six Zimbabwean women in Rudo Mutangadura’s offering Please Try Again Later are intricately bound up with the migrant nature that has shaped the country’s social fabric over the past century: husbands, fathers, brothers – in search of a better life – are powerful absences. But it is not the migration itself that shape them. The battles women fight and their daily struggles are not much different from the ones women in developing countries face. The sharpness of the play cuts so much more because it is honed on the abrasive interdependencies of three generations: young mother in search of her husband who went down south and has since been unreachable; fellow passenger, Gogo, Gogo who reveals that she too was once left behind by a husband in search of a better life; and the frivolous and flashy diaspora returnee, whose ideas of what a good living is border on the insane – all hard-hitting performances. Mutangadura’s play combines naturalism and symbolism – the mystery of the missing husband; characters slipping out of the action to speak to the audience. This poeticised structure highlights the universal aspects of their individual situations. Director Zaza Muchemwa’s choice of setting, a simple stage design of just chairs to provide seating in said Kombi, tethers the drama to its context, and relies on motion and emotion to produce a creation that is acute and passionate.

It’s good to see the experimentation with the possibilities of motion in a stage reading. Particularly in a stage reading where there is no dress rehearsal no stage props and no lights and is a culmination of writing workshops which have resulted in a not so perfect play but one that has the potential to become a masterpiece.

Mutangadura and Muchemwa use motion symbolically to signify migration, movement and temporary communities who confined in the intimate precincts of the commuter omnibus are transformed into neighbours. This is especially telling in a city where people hardly talk to each other. Of course nothing is certain, least of all truth, and no matter how familiar the story of the search is, nothing prepares one for the inevitable end of the search and bad decision making.

There are shades of the theatre of the absurd in the writing, which can prove frustrating for the audience and turn on the young mother. We experience the pain she feels and all the women feel, but, with its turns of humour and jarring driving of the kombi driver and constant disregard of potholes and humps, Muchemwa’s production also suggests the firing of synapses, memory loss, and the way in which the mind sometimes tries to black out trauma. 

What’s not in doubt is a real sense of despair and fear and the play’s deeply moral heart, which suggests that even in times when truth is slippery it is well worth searching out.

Charmaine Mujeri, Teddy Mangawa, Rumbi Karize, Francis Nyamuhwa, Priviledge and Talent